From First Draft to Bestseller: Self-Publish and Market a Book that Readers Will Love

1. Promo Video: Hi. Welcome to from first drafted bestseller. In this course, you'll learn a step by step guide for how to create, publish and market, a beautiful, high quality electronic and print version of your book that readers are going to want to buy. I'm Jonathan Poma, an award winning, best selling author of three independently published novels that have out sold authors such as Chuck Palahniuk, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Crichton on Amazon's Kindle store. I've also written 11 screenplays that have won over 150 awards and honors at various international stream rating competitions, and I recently Option one of those screenplays toe one of the producers of the American Pie and Final Destination films. And since 2000 and five, I've worked at over 15 public schools in the United States and to language schools in Mexico, and I currently have a California secondary teaching credential and teach at a secondary school here in San Diego, where I've been for about the last 10 years. I designed this course before beginning Authors were overwhelmed what to do after they type that their first draft of their novel and want to learn how to turn that manuscript into a book that readers are gonna wanted by this course will awful also benefits of veteran authors, both independently and traditionally published, like strategies on how to market their book. And even if you haven't yet written your book and your just curious about what's to come check out from first drafted bestseller, we're going to cover how to edit format your book, how to Get reviews, how to get your book into stores, both brick and mortar and outline how to get your book in the library's um, How to Grow your mailing list and how to sell your book using strategies that many independent authors have used to make enough money to quit their jobs and to write full time. So feel free to check out the course description, and I hope to see you in class. 2. Course Introduction: hi and thank you for enrolling in from first drafted bestseller and thank you for investing in your writing career. This course is a step by step guide to creating publishing and marketing prints and electronic versions of your book that readers are going to love. I designed this course is a Siris of screen casts and talking head videos, just like you're seeing right now, but mostly screen casts that you can follow along with on your computer. And so the active task for each lesson will just be the specific topic that I'm discussing in that lesson, and you can follow along and complete that task as you're watching the video. I structured this course into a series of topics, broke it down into an introduction section on how to create the book on that include such videos and lessons as how to edit and formats how to get a cover design made for your book . I then broke it down into a publishing section, and that would be how to turn your book into an electronic and print format of your book and then get that up on online retailers and to get printed versions of your book so that you can mail them to reviewers. And then there's also a section on marketing, and this section is going to contain information on how to grow your mailing list, how to create book bub and Amazon ads essential. This is gonna help you to target your audience, build that audience from zero, and to get his many readers to fall in love with your writing as possible. All right. Oh, and then also there is a section on screenwriting. So I I threw this in because I knew that there's a lot of writers who are interested in taking that jump from novel to potentially turning that that story into a screenplay. So I'm going to give you the very basics on how to do that. And I hope that that that is something that's going to be very useful for you also, what this course is not. It's not a get rich quick scheme. All right, so this is this course is is designed to, as like a long term strategy that will be, you'll see the best results when you apply these these strategies over the long term, and it's it's even better when you apply them over a series of books. So if you just have one book, don't worry. These these strategies should still be effective for you. However, this the strategies are best when you are publishing a number of books and you're repeating the same strategies. Also, this course is not designed to teach you how to write a potentially bestselling book. It's just gonna teach you how to take that manuscript and to turn it into a potential best seller and let me define what I mean by bestseller here. I'm not talking about like the New York Times bestselling list. I'm talking about lists like the Amazon best selling shirts or, you know, maybe the best selling lists on iBooks for Apple. So while these three strategies may may, you know, is a very small chance they could get you on The New York Times best sellers list. That's not necessarily what I mean by bestseller here in this case. Okay. And also I'd like to start from a place of empowerment by saying something which might seem , you know, contradictory to empowerment, but and that would be no one owes you anything. Okay, and and I know I know as well as anybody else. How much work goes into creating a book writing a book, publishing a book. However, you know you might put hundreds or even thousands of hours into creating and publishing your book. And then once you get it up for sale on Amazon, you know you might get 12 sales. And you know, all 12 of those are the family and friends. And so just so you know, nobody owes you anything. And again, I know that might sound like a negative way to start this this course, but I think it's an empowering way to start this course, because this way we're getting away from outside influences, and we're taking the responsibility ourselves for how successful our books and our career as writers are going to be. And the way that we can do this is by first of all, creating the most high quality books that we possibly can. And Second Weekend, using technology today target our our readers hungry readers with laser like accuracy. And this is something that we can do, regardless of whether or not we're getting supports from certain members of our community of family or friends or whatever we can reach out, and we can find our own readers. Okay, so again that the power is is in your hands, you can with as much effort as you put in. I do believe that you can get that much. Are those the results? Will will follow. Also, you may need some technology for this course and any any of the forms of technology, the products or whatever that I recommends. I am not being paid by any any of those companies or buy those products or whatever these air just products that have worked for me. And I want to share this with you so that maybe it will work for you as well. All right, Also where I could I created strategies for writers of all budgets. So some of these strategies I include are there are some free options as well. So I know that that there are a lot of writers on a budget out there and I tried to Teoh accommodate those that budget as well. And by the end of this course, you should feel confident in creating, publishing and marketing your book. You should you should have a ton of strategies for how to build your mailing list, How to get your book in this book stores if you'd like to How toe You know how to get great reviews. So by the end of this course, you should. You know, I know that you're probably very overwhelmed right now with all the information, but you should feel much more confidence in how to create publish in markets your book. And if you want any more in depth information, I even included more. Resource is in this course so that if you're if you want more information on maybe how to market books, you know, I I included other strategies or other influencers in the self publishing community or whatever that that you could follow or books or whatever that you could read that will help you to get more information on those topics. But the information that I give you in this course this will get you set up. This will. This will alleviate a lot of the stress and anxiety that you may be feeling right now, which I believe me. I felt the same amount of stress and anxiety. What I got started and effect where this course came from is is over years of off research . So I have been researching how toe publish markets books, how to create books, had a great book blurbs. I've read a number of books I've attended meet up groups here in San Diego where I live. I was part of a group called Entrepreneurs, where we saw we had New York Times. Bestselling authors come in and give lectures on how to market books and how to advance yourself a za ah writer as an entrepreneur. And so I have gathered all this information and just just from doing it myself. And I am allow me to give this information to you, allow me to help you and ease that anxiety that you may have, and I am available for questions. But just please keep in mind the fact that I work is a teacher full time, and I write full time. And so if you do have questions, I would ask that you try to result those issues with whatever maybe company that you're having the issue with. Say, for example, you're having issues uploading your book on Amazon Tiu, Sell your book on Amazon Kindle direct publishing. I would ask that you contact Kindle direct publishing first, and then if you're still having proper questions or problems, or if you even want to know best practices and how to address some of your concerns with these people, feel Frida toe. Ask a question. This is not saying. You know you can't ask questions. Please ask questions that you have. I would just ask you first to try to resolve those issues with, like, maybe vellum or Amazon or iBooks or wherever. Okay, um, and also I live in an apartment here, and so I did the best I possibly could to get rid of any extra sounds. But as you've probably heard a couple times, there are planes that go by. I'm right here in the flight path in San Diego. Also, I've got some lovely neighbors who are generally pretty quiet, but every once in a while you hear some banging on the walls. You might hear somebody shouting, So I did my best to mask all the sounds. But you know, there's only so much that I could do. So if if for at any points you you hear some, you know, annoying backgrounds sound just no vets. It should end pretty soon. You know any of the videos? If there's anything like that that there was an issue throughout the entire video. I just got rid of all that, uh, footage, and I shot a new video. So if you're hearing anything that's annoying, it should ends pretty pretty quickly. And also again, thank you very much for enrolling. I hope you find this course useful again. I I Why I created this course to is that I have a lot of friends who are interested in writing. And I can't tell you how many people have asked me questions about how do I, you know, how do I publish a book hideaway for matter? What is formatting? What is an eye? ESPN. Do I need an ESPN? What is all this? This this insanity. I'm so completely overwhelmed with it. So I designed this this course originally because I wanted to help out friends and then, you know, just as being a member of a lot of different communities in writing communities, there's a lot of people have similar questions. So I wanted to give you a comprehensive course, a premium course on a budget for a writer's budget that will help to ease any anxiety that you have. I try to make this as as complete, of course, as I possibly could to take your book from first draft to potential best seller. So again, I wish you is much success as you could possibly experience. I hope you have more success than I have. And you know, again, if you have any questions for me, let me know. And I I am excited that we're taking this journey together. All right, thank you very much. 3. About the Instructor: I had. Welcome back to from first draft of best seller I'm John Le Poma, your instructor, and in this video I want to give you a little bit more information about me. So I am an award winning, best selling author of three independently published novels that have out sold authors such as Chuck, Paula, Nick, Michael Crichton and Pollak Willow on Amazon's Kindle store. I have also written 11 screenplays that have won over 150 honors at various international screenwriting competitions. And one of the producers of the American Pie in Final Destination films recently options one of my screenplays. And so I hope that soon enough, you should be able to see the film in a theater near you. All right, so I also write songs and poems. And since 2000 and five, I have taught in over 15 public schools in the United States and to language schools in Mexico, and I currently teach at a public secondary school here in San Diego, where I've starting my 10th year. And so I just want to give you a little bit off information to about my books and my successes as a writer grab these here. All right, So the first book that I had published is this one. It's called Developing Minds in American Ghost Story, and this one I did not publish. This one was published by an independent press in Florida. Cult laughing Fire Press I ends. This one came out in September of 2015 and it did fairly well. The first few months on the sales started to dip down, and but during those first few months it did sell over 2000 copies. In it Out sold authors like Michael Crichton and Kurt von Agate on the Kindle store. It was a number one Amazon bestseller and won a couple of awards. But then sales started to dip, and so after about, I don't know, about eight months or so, it sells kind of flat lined. And which is why I was surprised when last year I heard from my publisher are just a few months ago, I heard from my publisher that last year 2017 I sold over 120 copies of this book. Now the only thing that I had done different from 16 4017 is that I started a mailing list in 2017 and so I wasn't running ads or actively trying to promote this book. I wasn't doing any sales or anything like that. I just set up my mailing list, which I'm gonna show you how to do. And that allowed me to, I believe, sell 120 copies without really doing anything. So that's developing minds. And since then, I have been running ads for this book, and it's been selling really well on Amazon. Okay, so this is the second book that I published, and I published this one myself, using my publishing press, which I created Cult L'm Andro Arts. And this was actually the first book I ever wrote. And but I I thought because you see the size of this one, this was actually even even longer than that. And so this I did not feel, was in any shape of the time to go searching for a publisher. That's why published developing minds first. All right, I edited the heck out of this thing. And this this this one was a marathon of editing and writing. But this this is my first love. This is the first book I ever wrote, and it's always gonna be very special to me. This one was also a number one Amazon bestseller. Not sold polonco Well Oh, it was number one in, uh, Emma's three Amazon UK store In the metaphysical in visionary category. In a number of different categories as well in the UK are Canada and Australia. And this one I learned a lot about publishing because I had to do the whole thing myself. All right, so a lot of this that the strategies that tips that Sure I'm gonna give you in this course I gained those from creating this book and publishing this book. You see this one? That one second place in a competition called the Florida Authors and Florida Authors and Publishers Association Presidents Awards. It won the literary and contemporary literature category and then this one. This is my third book, and I wrote this once. The little guy here I wrote this one while I was waiting for the edits to come back for understanding. The Alec ran Now this one waas recommended by Burns and Noble. It made the Barnes and Noble press presents list for February in March of 2018. And this one was also recommended by Kirkus Reviews, as was developing minds. And so, you know, I feel this this book, it took all of my creative power. I feel to make it as short as it is. I feel like this is this is probably the best thing I have ever written, all right, And, um, but this I was able to publish this and write this so quickly because I had already had the experience with the other two books. So I wrote this one in the summer of 2017 and I got it out in February of 2018 and I understand that that's probably a long process for a lot of writers. Some writers write a book in a couple of weeks, and they get it out in a couple of weeks for me. I follow a little bit more of a traditional path off writing with the process that I do. It takes a little bit longer to get my books out and so just be clear here. Here, too. I writes in the literary fiction genre, which in the independently published World is Pretty much like the market is like a tiny little sliver. The biggest markets for self published books are like romance and SciFi fantasy mysteries, those those make up most of the market. So if you're writing in any of those genres and you're applying the strategies from this course, you are likely going to sell way more books than I'd ever have, all right, and you probably will continue to sell more books that I have. And so but I write in a genre that is almost non existent for independently published writers, and so I have had to work really hard to get the sales that I have. Since December, I've sold about 120 books on average per month, and so that that is going from like zero, you know, and we're going up right now. And I love the strategies that I have passed on to you in these lectures, these air strategies that I have gotten from other authors who are writing in genres like romance and SciFi, and they're selling enough books each month that they've been able to quit their jobs and write full time. All right, So, um, and the strategies that I'm giving you hear these air strategies that that will work for any genre, by the way, are and also for nonfiction as well. Okay, so I'm hoping and expecting for students of this course to out pass me in there. They're ah, they're sales and feel free to in in the the court, the question area on the course. Feel free to list your successes. I'd be interested in seeing them and also be interested. I'm sure your co um uh, code classmates would be interested in checking those out as well. All right, so that's just a little bit about me. You know, if you have any questions, too, about me, feel free to toe, ask them. Or you could check out my website or or whatever. Uh, and again, I'm glad that we're on this journey together to success as self publishers ads. And again, I'm looking forward to hearing more from 4. What is Self-Publishing?: All right. Welcome back to from first draft of bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be discussing self publishing. So what is self publishing? It is publishing your own work independently of another publisher. You are not submitting the book to agents. You're not submitting it to publishers. You are putting your writing. It's and you're putting it together yourself. You're creating publishing and marketing your own book. Now, that doesn't mean that you're doing everything entirely yourself. You know, you can still work with an editor of four matter cover designer. It just means that you are the person who isn't in control of the whole process. You get to pick which cover designer you want to work with. You get to pick which cover design you want to go with. You get to pick which four matter you would like to use so you can do everything literally , everything yourself. Or is you can work with people that you hire, but you are the boss. You are in control as a self publisher, and you can publish print or e books or both. So print books are obviously, you know, like hardcover books or or soft cover books. E books are books that you could read on electronic readers like kindles or nooks, and you can do both of those or you can just do either or now technology today makes it much easier to self publish. It's essentially made the process possible and are self publishing has been around for years, so this is nothing new. It's just, you know, people were self publishing the time of Dickins, so this is nothing new. It's just now because of advances in technology. It's cheap, and it's easy for authors to write a book, and they can get it in front of a worldwide audience and market to a worldwide audience without ever, ever having to leave their house. All right, so here is some of the advantages of self publishing. You have more freedom to write. What you want now, traditionally are traditionally what would happen if you're going to publish with like a Big Five publisher, you are going to have to querying agents. And chances are that agent, there's not gonna be any agents that pick up your book. And even if they do, they may tell you. All right, so you know I loved your book, but you're gonna have to change this this in this in this because, you know, according to the market, no, no publisher is going to then by the book and publish it. Unless you make these changes and then let's say maybe a miracle happens, and then the publisher buys the book and then they tell you Oh, well, you know, we're gonna have to make these these changes as well. You know, when you're when you're self publishing, you can write whatever you want to write. You don't have to worry about markets. You don't have to worry about pleasing anyone other than your readers. Also, this is good for niche writers. Are writers who write niche markets may be very small markets where they just want to reach 102 100,000 people. You know, you're not gonna be able to find a publisher in New York, you know, penguins not gonna pick up your booked just to sell. Sell it to 500 people, you know. So here you are in in control of your your book, and you're in control of how you want to create that book so you don't have to worry about any third parties telling you what to do and limiting you. You also make a higher royalty. Now let's say you traditionally publish your book with the company like Penguin. So penguin, they're going to take a huge chunk of of the sales for for each book sale because they have to pay their employees. They have to pay for the heating and the lighting. They have to pay the the editor. They have to pay their marketing team. You know so and then if they have to pay your agents or you pay your agent from your royalty rather. But by the end of after all these people get their cut, you're only getting a very small cut of each book sold. So you have to sell a lot of books in order to make money. As a self published author, you're keeping everything after the online vendors or the vendors have taken their cut. So, you know, like Amazon might take some might take 30% of each of your E books sold. You keep that other 70%. You don't have to share that with anyone else. So if you're selling a lot of books. As a self published author, you can make a lot more money, and also because you keep the entire royalty. You can sell your books for cheaper than that, the Big Five publishers and you can even make more money because for two reasons, because you're keeping, ah, higher percentage of your royalty and also because you may get more readers because you're charging less money for your books. And again, you can change whatever you want about the book whenever you want. Let's say you want to make some updates two months after you've published the book. Well, you know it. If you're self published off there, you can do whatever you want as it traditionally published off their the publisher is in control of all of that, so you'd have to ask them as a self published off. There. You choose that cover design, the formatting, etcetera. So you're again. You're in control of every aspect of this process. If you don't like the cover design, you could find another cover designer as a traditionally published off their most likely the publishing house, Penguin and HarperCollins. They're going to do this stuff for you, and you're either gonna like it or you're not gonna like it, but they're not gonna care, and you choose how to market it. So because advances in technology today, you can choose which audiences you'd like to target to market your book. Now this, you know, there could be advantage of that. But the thing is, if you're self publishing your book that you're at a disadvantage in the fact that's the traditional published publishing houses, they have got marketing teams, and they do help their authors to sell books to market their books. So as a self published author, you are on your own with this. But due to advances in technology today, there are ways that you can target your audience with laser like precision, and you can overcome some of the hurdles of not having a professional team helping you to market your books. All right, so some disadvantages of self publishing again, you have less money for marketing likely. All right. So likely you have less money for marketing than like HarperCollins. And that could potentially lead to fewer sales. You're probably not going to win a National Book Award or any big prestigious awards, which could lead to more sales. Generally, those those awards are reserved for books that are published out of the Big Five houses in New York. Your book from Glee will not be reviewed in The New York Times. You probably won't be getting a movie deal, and Barnes Noble probably won't sell your books and again because anyone could do it. You are competing with millions of other authors, literally millions of other authors, and so you're gonna have to find ways of standing out in an absolutely overcrowded market. Let's discuss technology. E books like kindles have made the process cheap and easy for self published authors to reach their their readers. All right, so if you just want to publish e books, you can definitely do that. And if you're writing quickly, you know you could write a book in in a month and get it up on Amazon. Get it up on KDP Select and get it out into the hands of your readers. You know you don't have toe. You don't have toe worry about setting the book up for Prince. You don't have to worry about doing print runs. You know you don't have Teoh worry about you know, any of that stuff you can just your writing on your own schedule. You could just get the book up on Amazon or kobo or wherever, and just get it out into your readers. Hands also print on demands. Technology has made this whole process ridiculously easy, so previous to print on demand technology. What you would have to do as an author if you wanted to sell books, is you would have to. You'd have to print books yourself, so maybe you had print 500 copies or 1000 copies. You'd have to store those copies somewhere, and then you would have to fulfill all of the orders yourself. So say a bookstore wanted order 10 books. You would have to, you know, package those books and mail those books yourself. Now with print on demand technology. When somebody orders your book from a website like Amazon, what the print on technology or P o. D. Companies like in drum spark or create space. What they do is they print one copy of the book to fulfill that order, and then they ship the book to that person who purchased the book. So this is This has made it so easy for self published authors to create high quality, beautiful print books to get to their readers. All authors have to do is to create the files, the cover file and the interior file, upload them to create space or in groups. Spark and readers can then buy copies of the books and get them shipped automatically. So it has made this process so easy. With one downside to this is the fact that the books are a little bit more expensive when their print on demand, as opposed to like If you bought books in bulk from a printer. You know, if you bought, like, 1000 books and you warehouse to those books, it will be cheaper. Likely then, buying 1000 print on demand books. But print on demand is what has allowed so many authors, self published authors to succeed. Today, our online vendors like Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Google play and Nook these air all websites where readers can buy e books and on Amazon bacon and nook, or I'm sorry and and Barnes and Noble at least they can buy print copies. Not a nook, though on, and this is This is where readers can buy copies and they can download copies to their E readers. And they can get start started reading the books almost instantly, you know. So let's say you only want to write an e book. You can write that e book very quickly, get it edited and then add it to a site like Amazon ends within a few days of getting it up on Amazon, your readers can start buying that book and getting it on their their kindles almost instantly, you know. So the having having these stores available for self published authors has made it extremely easy for for authors to make money to get their books out into the world. And, you know, if you put your book on Amazon once that book is approved, it is, you know, it's It's on an international websites where people all over the world can then buy your book. So essentially, with a few clicks of a mouse, you can get your book out in front of the entire world. So it's It's so easy now to sell your books. Thing is, you know, with with all these people doing it, it's there's you know it's an overcrowded market. It's a saturated market. So you're gonna have to find ways off getting people in in Canada, in the UK, in India, or wherever to notice your book and then want to buy it. And you conform at your books yourself. Do that advances in technology. So I'm gonna show you how to do that. In the the formatting section, I will show you a step by step guide on how to use a program called Vellum, which formats books for four prints and for e book and for the readers. And you can create your own cover design adds bookmarks on that. There's so much you can do with advances in technology today that it makes all of this stuff very easy, and you can target ads to specific customers with laser like accuracy rather than you know in the past, if you wanted to advertise a book, you might have taken ad in like The New York Times and the pay tens of thousands of dollars to do that. And here, anybody who is reading that that newspaper can see your ad, and most of those people probably would not be readers of your book, but today you can target ads to specific customers. You could target Facebook ads to people of specific age ranges in specific countries with specific interests. You know, it's it's incredible how, how accurately you can target people today. So this is This is great for is a great way for independent authors or self published authors to reach their audiences. And you couldn't work with people from all over the world without ever having to lead your house for me. I my four matter, lives in Tasmania. My editor lived in New York. Another editor lived in New Zealand's, uh, my cover designer. She is from Taiwan, but she was living in Colombia when she designs my book, you know, and I found all of these people online. I've interacted with all of them online. It's just incredible to be able to work with people from all over the world without ever having to leave your apartment. You know my my publisher in Florida, who published my book Developing Minds. I've never even met him, and we've been interacting for years, you know. So this is an on a lot of off writers, especially are are shy people who don't necessarily want to interact with people face to face. But this technology has made it so easy for you to work with people throughout the entire world without ever having to to leave your house. And so one thing about technology, those that it's constantly changing and it will change by the time you've probably finished this course from the time that I'm making this course to the time that you actually are watching this course, things are going to have changed. Right now. I'm currently hearing that create space, which is one of the P o. D publishers is is slowly, might slowly phase out, and KDP or kindle direct publishing may take over. You know, they may have a print service that takes over four create space, you know, so and that all of this stuff is constantly changing. There was, ah, an aggregator called pronoun, which was run by MacMillan and that shut down in January. And I mean, I'm gonna explain what aggregators are in a future lecture, but companies are constantly starting up and then closing down. Forms of technology are constantly changing vellum, which I previously mentioned they did not have print capabilities. Previous two, I believe Summer of 2000 and 17. If I remember, Get if I'm remembering that correctly, so technology is going to change, so you have to be. You have to be fluid yet. Do you have to change with technology instead of fighting it? You know, say, for example, you published your books on pro down. You're finding out that it's it's closing down. I mean, sure, you can feel bad about that, you know? But just remember that the reason why you are able to self published today with such with such success and so efficiently is because of technology. So you need to embrace technology flow with technology. Any time some other form of technology shuts down, likely something new is going to grow in its place. Whenever one opportunity ends, there's another opportunity just around the corner. So try not to think of this in such a black and white manner. Just you gotta flow. You know, you gotta change with the times. Self publishing, at least in its current state, is very new, all right, and things are changing all the time. Self publishing. Five years ago, this was completely different to self publishing today. The way it looked in 2013 versus the way it looks in 2018 are completely different. So, you know, you just got to be on top of things and and be very flexible. All right, so next we're going to discuss editing. So, you know, we've given you a little bit of information about what self publishing is. I've given you information about my own process with how I self published books. Now we're going to get into actually how to edit and format books, how to get reviews and all that. So please stick around and I hope to see you next with this lecture on editing. 5. Isn't Marketing a Book Considered "Selling Out?": hi and welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John lymphoma. And in this lecture, I'm going to be discussing selling out. So is marketing your book selling out? And the answer to that question is yes and no eso this is going to be something different for every single person. All right, so if you feel that, you know, marketing your book is selling out. I would imagine that you don't think that way, because if you did, you probably wouldn't have purchased this course. Or maybe you did just for the create and publish material and if so, cool, you know. But I would imagine most people who have purchased this course field that marketing your book is not necessarily selling out. Or maybe you feel maybe you feel that it it you know, there's a fine line between selling out ends and good marketing. And so that's for me. I feel like, you know, I'm walking that line here for me. I feel that, you know, as long as in my marketing efforts, I am staying true to myself as a writer. I'm staying true, you know, to my books and respecting my books. Um, and all I'm doing here is trying to find breeders for my books targeting readers, and I'm not being really sales the about it or annoying about it. And I feel that there are readers out there who will love my books and who, just based on reviews that I've already gotten who do love my books. And so I just I just feel like I am. You know, I'm playing like a matchmaker between my books and readers who might love my books. And so I'm just setting them up on a date. And I feel that if I do that in a responsible and ethical manner, that that's not necessarily selling out now, somebody else mites might disagree with me. But for me, when I write a book, I am you know, I will not compromise with what I write. I personally do not right to market. I know a lot of people do, and a lot of people who are making the most money. Those are people that are probably writing to market. I don't to do that. I don't have anything negative to say about those people, but for me, I write the stories that begin within me, no matter how weird, strange, whatever depraved those stories might be. I have those stories inside of me and I need to get them out now. As long as I feel that isn't that as a writer and off there, I am giving those words safe passage into the world. And then with my marketing, all I'm doing is, you know, trying to find people who might be interested in those books. I personally don't feel like that's selling up, you know, and so everybody's gonna have it difference opinion on this matter. But I would not just come into this thinking. Well, marketing is selling out. I know a lot of people who think that and those people one of them has currently got a book . That's ranks I thinking in the 10 or 11 million's on Amazon's bestseller rankings. Now I'm not trying to judge that person. I'm just saying that I've seen how that person wrote a book. He's really passionate about his book. He got it up for sale on Amazon. It didn't do anything. I think he just assumed that people were going to read it and love it. It was gonna go viral you know, And that's just not the case. Very, very rarely is that the case. You know, there are always the exception to the rule. Somebody might write a book that put it up on Amazon, do no marketing, and they're a multimillionaire overnight, you know, it's possible it's not probable. And so I think that if I think that you can't just put the book up there and then complain that nobody is reading it, I think that you need to find ways of introducing your book to people, to readers without doing that in sales and annoying ways. And so what? I'm gonna show you strategies on how to do that in this course, all right. And if you have any stretches to feel free to share those in the course comments section, you know, this is not this is not a lecture. This is I like for this to be a community here. We're giving and sharing information, right? So I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter. Um, and it is something that I have dealt with. You know, at first I was very resolute against, you know, any kind of marketing, but I have come around to that and seeing how marketing has helped for me to get my books into the reader's hands. Breeders who love my books, you know, So I don't know what? I don't have all the answers. Maybe you have a whole the answers, so let me know. All right, go. 6. How to Get Your Book Professionally Edited, and Why this is Critical : All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller again. I'm Jonathan lymphoma. And today we're gonna talk about editing. That's a very fun topic. I'm sure a lot of you excited here. Okay, So before we get started, I just want to give a list of recommended books that will help with the editing process. Now, some of these books are books on how to just write better. You know, when you're writing is at its best, you're going to have fewer mistakes or fewer corrections in your book. So here are some books that that I believe are excellent to help writers write better words and thus make it easier to edit. So here we go. Uh, self editing for fiction writers by Dave King and Ready Brown. Obviously this one is is tailored more toward editing. I used this one before editing my first book Developing Minds in American Ghost Story, and I highly recommend it. The next one. That that really helps with editing as well is the Elements of Style by William Strunk on E . B. White. This is a classic book. You've probably already heard of this one. It's really small. I recommend getting into that. Another great book is Make Your Words Work by Gary Provost Fantastic Writer Ends I learned a ton from this book, something with keys to great Writing by Stephen Wilbur's It's another fantastic one on writing. Well, was the first book I read that about writing that the one by William Zinsser and I highly recommend that one as well. And on writing by Stephen King, this one's half memoir, half book on writing and that when again, fantastic book, I recommend all of these and again. I think that's the better you writes. The better your first draft will be in, the less you'll have to worry about editing. Okay, so now we're gonna talk about how to find an editor. So, you know, again, I very highly recommend working with a professional. I wouldn't just pass this off to a friend or your wife or your husband or your mother. Make sure that you're getting an unbiased person, a professional, to take a look at your writing before it gets out into the world. And so the first place where you could find an editor is a website called Risi and reads He's a fantastic website you can use this for for a number of different things. I found editors there found my cover designer for my last book. There you could find people to help you market your book publicists and all that. So here we go. So the way to use reads E to see up here. You know, just go to read z dot com. It's r e d s y dot com. Then you'll have to tow log in, creating a new account to user name and password. When you look in, you'll come to this screen here and see how we have got Ah, whole list of different topics that's that are covered here. So if you're looking for an editor, essentially what this is is it's a curated list of professionals who you can search for on this site. So see how this editing tab here is clicked. You can go here to see which one you're looking for. Maybe if you're just looking for a proof read, click that and then sees some of them quickly. Jonah, Here's some of them are specialists in certain areas, so maybe we've got crime and mystery, and we're looking for somebody who at its in in UK English. So see how this this narrowest your selections down right away makes it really easy. And then all you have to do is go through the different editors. You see a little bit of, ah of information about them. Here you see their their user rating, their response rate where they are located in the UK or where they're located. In general, if you click on this little section here, you can get more information about them. You can see which books they have edited. You can see their resume, you can read their bio, and then you could see what services they offer. See what areas they specialize in, what languages they specialize in again. They're certifications or their their resume, and you could check out some of their other work. So if you really wanted Teoh, get a better idea, you know, maybe could check one of these and then it pulled up there. There, Amazon page, see how it says, Look inside here. You can click on that, and then if you want to just sort of scan through the book, you can get a sample of something that's that this editor has worked on. Okay, uh, and then you can get reviews here as well. So looks like she did a top notch job here. Okay, so let's say you want a higher clear rush, Brooke, As an editor, all you have to do is click Select. See how it says that says four more professionals, to quote, you can select up to five professionals. Let's just let's just go through here, will save the ones. Uh, these five. Let's say maybe we gotta come back later on. You can star somebody you know and ends. Come back to them later on. Okay, so now again, we've selected that we once we want proof reading in Crime and mystery and UK English. So then we go to continue ends. This is where you're going to submit your editing brief. So you're going to submit this information to these five editors now, they can either choose to accept your job or they can reject it off the rejected. They usually give you a reason why. Sometimes it's because of scheduling or, you know, the other reasons. So it's good to give detailed information. You can select your book, See my my books already programmed already have information for these books, or you could enter a new title. If you're new to the website and then you can give a date for when you like your ad, it's to be returns. I would recommend giving them a realistic timeline. Don't just say you know what? Today it's February 18th 2018. Don't say they want it back by tomorrow. You know, that's clearly not going to happen. Oh, sorry. This is when when they should return the quote spy. Okay, so I generally give them a week, you know, it gives them some time to review the brief and then see if it would be a good fit. And then I gave my editors over a month again because I wanted to. I didn't want to rush the job. And so like like I said, if in my other lecture about my process and if you didn't listen to that my processes I submits the book to an editor after I have edited it myself twice. And then when that editor gives the book back to me, I go through it again. I submitted to a second editor, and so I try to give myself enough time with this process so that I am not just typing up my book. And I come up with a publication date that's one month away, you know? And meanwhile, I've got the book. It's not gonna be edited by then. So just mind your deadlines. If again, if you're gonna be working with a professional editor there, you have to give them enough time to complete tasks. And you really want to give them. You don't want to rush them through it, right? You're paying these people to to care about your project, So give them every opportunity they can. Teoh do the best with your work and so Okay, so give the word counts. Genre, Introduce yourself. Give the book details. So this this here I would recommend putting this in because you give more of information to the editor and then they can see whether it would be a good fit for them or not. And this I would highly recommend you doing submit up to 3000 words for them Teoh sample for as a sample. So they can they can edit it and you can see what they're editing job would look like I very highly recommend this, that the quality has has ranged a little bits. And some of the editors that I've worked with are that I submitted briefs to. And so some of the people who are quoting the most money aren't necessarily the best. So I would submit a brief and then see who would be the best fit for you. So once you filled out all the information, you're gonna submit a brief that you would go to your requests. Okay? Yeah. I want to leave the page here. So I I submitted a brief here for design. So these were the people that I had queried over Ah, the cover design for my my novel this summer of Crowd. And I ended up going with sin you chew and so what these these people will do. And so this this would say, editor there editing for you. If if you're looking for editor, these people will review your brief and they'll send you quotes. And so you can click and view. The quote could see how much money they would potentially charge you for that job. And you can see the sample at its they did to your manuscript. And then if you accept the job, you have to pay Theo editor of the fee or the designer, their fee or the publicist their fee. And then you also have to pay reads e a fee. So that is something to keep in mind if you're going to be using this. But it it's fantastic. I've used risi now to find I found the editor for my last book this summer of Crowed on Greasy And I found the designer here and Cindy Chu she was fantastic and I would hire her again for another job. Okay, so that's read. See, I'm gonna come back to Risi when we're discussing design. Because again, I found my cover designer here on Reid's e. Alright, So back to this. Okay, so another site is book baby and I have not used book baby. This is a website, though, that I've heard other people have used and have headlight. So this one, it's similar to read Z and that you can find editing services, designed services, all different types of services here to say we're looking for an editor. You can find out Earth Select, which editing you would like and shows how it works here. So choose the book editing Steps service you need. Upload your word documents and retrieve your professionally edited manuscript in 8 to 10 days. So this again is another service that you can use. It's called Book Baby, and I have had other people recommend it, or you could join groups to get referrals again. I mentioned Facebook groups in one of my earlier lectures. I would very highly recommend getting on the Internets ends and meeting other people or just getting into the community. Going to writers events, go to book signing events, you know, just good a library events, meet other authors and see who they would refer you to. I works with an editor on my last two books, and I am going to use him again. And then I I found him through a Facebook group referral. Okay, so one thing you're going to be hearing to a lot about our beta readers. So there there are professional editors, people that you pay money to toe. Go through your strip of your I keep wanting to say script to go through your manuscript, your book, and to edit it, however you would you're hiring them for so, like, if you're hiring them for ah ah, copy, edit or a proof read. You know, beta readers are people that you don't necessarily higher. They're people who volunteer to to read your book and give you information about it. So these are people who read your story and give you feedback, you know? So they're not editors? Um, I wouldn't send them a final trapped, too, by the way. So this way they they have. You're not giving them a draft. They're gonna have toe to find tons of errors with, But they're people that are gonna help you with character and plot development plot holes. They'll give you their opinion of this story. We'll tell you. Hey, this ending was terrible. Why would you end it so abruptly? And generally, writers will submit their books to 456 However, many beta readers, the beta readers, will read the story that give their feedback, and the author will choose to accept that feedback, or they will did not choose to accept it, but always make sure you're being respectful with these people. They're they're using their time to help you. All right? So even if they give you some ridiculous suggestion, just say thank you. Smile and and move on again. These things, people will test out the story that give you feedback that lets you know if there are typos , you know? But they're not people. You can't expect them to scour through your story as an editor would. You know, as somebody you're paying, you're paying a professional to scour your book into find errors. You know, that's one thing. But if you have some having somebody just volunteering their time to help you out, I don't think that you could really expect them to, um, to do something like that. Okay, so now where do I find beta readers? You can find them in writers groups. So again, facebooko are people that you meet, um, out in the community. So Facebook there there are good reads groups dedicated to this and Google searches. So I just typed in beta readers. And there I had people a number of, um uh, beta readers show up in the search, so use this used These resource is to find your beta readers. And also, if you're if you creating a mailing list. As your mailing list gets bigger, you can ask people in your mailing list to to see if they would potentially beyond, like your Beta Rieder team. All right, so tips for editing remember, always be respectful, even though these people may give you suggestions that you absolutely hate that you think are terrible. Smile and say thank you. Consider making changes again. You may get your work back, and you know, somebody might have crossed out some part that you absolutely love. Remember that this is an impartial third party that is reviewing your work. And really, you should consider what they have to say because they're looking at your your work with a pair of fresh eyes. And if they're telling you something is just not working and you keep hearing the same thing from beta readers or other editors, they're telling you, Hey, this thing is not really working out. Even if you love it, you know there's to quote Kill your Darlings. I would recommend considering to change that thing, and there's just a little bit of information to that I've heard along the way about writers groups or, like beta readers you know if if everybody is telling you that something is wrong, it likely is. But when they start giving you suggestions on how to change that thing, they're always wrong. You know, it's up to you, the writer, to come up with the changes or two to determine whether you to change something. And then if so, you need to make the changes that you need to know because nobody's knows this story better than you do. So you're the one that really needs to come up with those those changes if they're necessary And also look for a good fit. Make sure that this this editor is editor of the beta readers there. People who enjoy your genre who are competent, who like you, you know, like if you guys are a good fit, that will help the process. Okay, so the next lecture we're gonna talk about formatting another really fun topic. So thanks. And we'll see again 7. How to Format your Book for eReaders and Print: right? And welcome back to from first draft of best seller I'm John lymphoma. And today we're going to be talking about formatting eso. What is formatting? Formatting is preparing your book for print or E readers. Okay, so you can format your book for print or you perform at your book for E readers or both. It's the formatting print and e books. So one way you can format your book is by using what are called book designed templates. Now what? These are R. C. So you can it's gonna click one of these here, click pulp here. Basically, what you do with these templates is that you can just copy and paste your manuscript. So few rights in I don't know, uh, Microsoft Word or or Schreiner or whatever. You can copy and paste your manuscript into one of these templates, and it will do the formatting for you. And by formatting, I mean, look here, see how this book has got standard merchants. All right, it's all justified here, meaning that everything lines up on this right. Merge in and on the left, see how we've got the check to to appear that in the title and the author name up here. Now, these are things that you can't just uploaded Microsoft Word file on Ingram Spark and expect the prince copy to come out looking like this, you need to format it first. The same thing with E readers. You need to format your book so it can be read on E readers. And there are various formats for difference E readers, so you might have to format it differently for nook vs Kindle. Okay. Kindles require a Mobi file a dot m o b I. And most of the others require an e pub. Just an e p u b. Right. So this is one option for formatting. You can download one of these templates which are quite affordable, so I'll show you think the pricing is at the bottom here? Yes. So a single license here to use this for both your prints and e book. So this will take care of both of those is on sale right now for $29. Okay. It's usually 59. Once you pay for this, they will send you some files. And if you want to open up the file in word, say, for example, so you won't open the word file for your book size. You would just open that file and then you copy and paste your information onto that template. That's a little more complicated than that, but they give you step by step videos for how to do that. So this is one way of formatting your book, and I did mention something about size there. So Prince books have different sizes, so five by age, this is a standard size. It's five inches by eight inches. Obviously, six by nine is is bigger than five by eight. And therefore, if you have a book that six by nine, it's going to be able to hold more words per page. So if you've written a very lengthy book, you might want to consider using a bigger size. And if you've written a smaller one, you might want to consider a smaller size too. Okay, so, again, this is one option that you can do, and there are a number of great looking styles here, and you can use them for Children's books and all different types of books. You can put pictures in them. Eso that's that's one option. Okay, Another option is press books. This is one that a lot of people use as well, so I just went to this press books The press books dot com four authors Press books always look good and printed on all e book platforms so you can use press books to format the prince copy of your book and the e book. And then, if you want to get started, click here. I have not used press books, so I don't know very much about how to use it. But from what other people have told me, it's fairly simple. So this is one that you can use. Click here if you want to create your book and they'll walk you through the process here. Okay, so one thing to keep in mind to, though, is the pricing. So if you wanted to a PdF and an e book, so you'll need a pdf toe upload to to Prince publishers or printers like Create Space or Ingraham Spark. So if you want to create a print book, you're going to need a PdF. And for e books you need, like an E pub or a Moby Okay, so the price if you're gonna do for prints and for e books would be $99 here. If you just want to do before Manning for one e book, it's It's 1999. Okay, so again, that's another option. Another option would be draft to digital. So a lot of users writers use drafted digital drafted Digital is a aggregator, and I'm going to discuss this in a later lecture. Basically, what aggregators do are you upload your book to a website like draft to digital, and they put it up for sale on multiple stores. So maybe, like Amazon and iBooks and kobo, they do it all for you, and then you can You can get daily updates on your sales from them. They pay you on regular schedules, and they'll also format your book for free. But in return they take a percentage of your sales. Okay, but you can you can four metre book for free using drafted digital. The way that I found this page was just going to draft to digital dot com, and so that will bring you to if we start here with drafted digital, just goto how it works and then sear it says four met here, So just click here to see the step by step process here. So this is gonna walk you through how to four met your book on draft to digital so they don't have a style guide or any special formatting requirements. All you would need to do is upload your your word documents RTF for any other file types. Word can read. So you upload that and they will format it for you. So this I'm going to go into a little bit more detail with this in a later lecture. So let's skip over this for now. You see up here, I've got reads E on the next tab. So as you could maybe guessed that that's what we're gonna discuss here next. So read C is another platform for formatting books. This is something I just found out about. Uh, the great thing about this is that it's free, says you see here it's a powerful writing tool from Read. See, you can you can four match your books here. Okay. And there's there's a how to video. So you know, you could click this and watch it, and it does walk you through the process, so and it says, you know, typeset so you can export. After you have used this service, you can export a PdF and an e pub. There's a video here that will show you how to do it. It doesn't seem all that difficult. And I know of a lot of writers that have used this, and they say It's pretty simple and the great thing about it is that's free at least free right now while I'm making this video, Okay. And another option here is to hire someone, and you can find four matters on sites like Book Baby, Read Z or fiver Eso. You could pay somebody to actually do this for you. Now I pay someone. I have paid someone to format the prince copies of my book, and they do a fantastic job. But they're called Polk Garris Studios ends again. They low cost and they really do great work. So I eat. I started out trying to use the book designed templates, but I had some complicated for Matic for my book Understanding the L. A Grant. So I just figured, you know what? I'll just spend the money to get somebody who knows what they're doing to do it, So hiring somebody is also another option. Now, one of the best options out there is vellum. This this is a fantastic piece of software. It's an app that you buy and you download on your computer, and it works just like Microsoft Word or shrive ner. Whatever, whatever other app that you have ends, it is a quick and easy way to create beautiful, high quality prints and e books. This is so easy you probably don't really need very much assistance with it. I am going to do a step by step demonstration and how to format using vellum so that this way you have an idea. But you could probably just play around with yourself and figure it out. That's what I did. It's very, very simple. A couple of down sides. It is expensive soap. It's 199 99 if you want to use it to make unlimited e books. And so if you're planning on writing, you know multiple books in the long run, it will be cheaper, probably just to tow by vellum. If you just have the one book you might want to consider using Read Z or another free service to to do that. And it's 2 49 99 to do both Prince and E books. Okay, so you can you conform at four prints on vellum. That's a new service they have. It was not available when I put before published understanding the L. A Quran back in August 2017. I was hoping it would be ready by then. It wasn't. Which is why I hired pull Gary's studios to do it for me and again, do you recommend them? And I had them just to the print copy. I did use vellum Teoh format understanding the L A crack. Another issue with this is that it's Mac only, but you can use the cloud on PC. There are some websites, tutorials and how to do this. I really don't understand exactly how to do that. But if you do have a PC and you want to use vellum, don't don't worry. You know you there is possibility that you can do that using cloud. All right, so I'm gonna show you step by step, how to format using vellum and again, it's really easy. So you have to do is open up the APP click import word file, or you can just drag your file right onto the little flower here. And it will do that for you. Um, so you can import the word file. I already I just have this one set up here. So the summer of crowd, the 1st 2 chapters so imported. Look how simple that waas it already divided it up into chapters. You know, it's the formatting is done, you know, a double click. And here we are. It's not that simple, but the major work is already done. So the way to get this divided up in the chapters is just in your manuscript. Make sure when you're starting a new chapter started on a new page and then write the word chapter or whatever at the top of the page. So if you're like typing in Microsoft Word, whatever, you start a new chapter, tight chapter, and then chapter whatever number and then vellum will automatically be able to put that into the correct chapter order here. Now, you may still want to go through it just to be sure that everything is ok, but for me. It's It's always been All right. All right. So now we got the book in here noticed only two chapters. This is only the 1st 2 chapters of my book. My book. So right, so let's that's type the title of our book in. So that will show up here once we click off of that or click somewhere else. So the summer of crowd pops up there, Type the author in. If you want to add any contributors you can changing the language here, you can add the ESPN, and, um, it'll show up on the page here. The ad recover. You know, you just click here and then you can upload your cover image. All right, so I jumped ahead, and I just added my cover. All they have to do is click here and find the file and uploaded. It took me a little while to find it, so I just skipped ahead here. See down here that there are minimum requirements, so this Onley satisfies those minimums. You might want to give this information to your designer if your book fails to meet this minimum requirement. So OK, so now we've got our cover on here. We've got our title page. We've got a table of contents which is automatically made for us. So what we can do next is we could start adding the front matter of our book. So we've got a title page here. So the front matter is this stuff, like, you know, your title page of copyright page. I always puts blurbs review blurbs in my, uh, front matter. So this way it entices. Readers want to buy it. So if you click on title page here, uh, let's see Bombs A publisher, you could add that l'm andro Hearts publisher link www dot l men. Dro hurts dot com So this this will link. If you put your logo on here, it's gonna pop up here in a little link to your website contents. This is your table of contents If you want to add chapters, if you want to add information, go here up to chapter on, then see what says add element. So go over here and say we want to add blurbs to the front matter of our book. See how it just made this new page here. So here we can just weaken ad blurbs obviously these air made up here. But you can change these, all right? So if you want to add more of these, we want to make sure we get a copy right in there. So you get at all of your copyright information with a chapter at another elements, you can add a dedication. So here's the shows for my family and notice How would you type it here It for mets it for you on the page is already centering it, you know, just like with the praise. See how we type this year. So that name is here, and then it gets shifted over there. It's doing the formatting for you. This is why you pay vellum the big books, right? An epigraph. So here we g o and you could move the order of these things. Say you want your dedication to come after the epigraph. Just shift them over and you can. You don't go up here. This this shows you how How would it look on these various devices to say we want to see how this looks on a kindle paperwhite. Let's just start from beginning here. So we've got our cover, which is in black and white. Okay, so we go to the praise page, we go title page, we go to the copyright page. We got our quote from Aid Lincoln for my family table of contents. Boom. And then we're right in to the book here. Now, we can change the styles of this book as well. So see how you know we got chapter one hair. See how this looks. We can change the way that set up. All right, So if you just go to styles here, So the book style, see where it's highlighted. Here is his book style. This is the book style we currently have. But if you click through these, it gives you different styles. So maybe we like this one. You don't go that are we like this one. So this is what's what's so easy and great about this? Is that you can I mean, just with a few clicks of the button, you can, you know, get great great book styles. I've used Meridian before. Let's just use trace here for this, all right? And then you could also stylized different things like the heading here. So if you want to look through different headings. Um, you can. And that's just, you know, see how this how this shows up. It's just showing the heading for the chapter. So let's say we like that one. I like that one. That's the first paragraph of a chapter. So you conform at that as well. So this see how it's just normal? There's no, uh, there's no caps or anything other than to start the sentence. You know you could do. You could choose ones where the 1st 3 letters air in all caps. Maybe the whole first line is in all caps, or we have dropped caps here, which I like. Those is just a smaller drop cat. So let's say we want the monster drop caps here. So now we've got that style paragraph after a break. So we have breaks in a text. I don't know if I have any in this here. See, I don't think I do, but what we can do is I'll make a break in the text and I'll show you what that means. So let's just say we like this for a break in the text, all right? And an ornamental breaks. So if we do have a break. So you have this. This is putting a brake. Looks like you know you've got a space here. It's not a new chapter in just a space. So you can create an ornamental for these. So if you want it had this little snowflake there we can into this little bar said, Let's go with the bar. All right, if you have block quotes, this is how they look again. Simplicity like that one verse. This is why I did not go with the book designer template because I had song lyrics and poetry that I wanted to put in my book Understanding the Alec ran and I just I thought it was gonna be a little too difficult for me to do Vellum. You know, it makes it so simple. If you've got a photograph, you know, if you want to add a little frame around it or if you want to do a little gray frame, let's say we want a great frame for photographs. When her adding a portrait in the back of the book, let's say we want the old school oval thing here. You know, we'll keep that if you want captions after your pictures could do that. Headers and footers. This is for the print version. If you want it to look, let's just flip to another page here or no, I'm sorry. Let's let's see what it looks like in print. All right, so this is how the page would look in print. Oh, and see down here. I do have a break here the next morning. Okay, All right. So let's say we like, um, this design and then the body. Let's go down here. Let's say that indicate paragraphs with indentation. I like that. Some people do it with spacing to justify the text. If you can click this, see how this does not line up anymore. So you definitely want a justified tax. That's just a standard for books. Allowing hyphenation will allow bigger words to be broken up, and it will reduce the amount of space on these lines. So let's see if that the sea where it's his puke ing chunky guts. Let's see if that gets smaller here. Yeah, people used to get see how the others there's less spacing here. That's just something to keep in minds with hyphenation, it says. Not all platforms can hyphenate. And there's also some things you can do here for the print version. You could change the funds, you know. Dhobi Gary Bomb Pro That's my go to I Love Gorman pro at the font size Seacon. Decrease it or increase it on e readers. This doesn't matter. So on an e reader, like a Kindle or a nook, the readers are going to be able to change the size and the fonts. So this is just an option here for the print edition to see us as print. So that line spacing this is gonna change the amount of spacing between the lines. And this is what a four matter would do if you pay someone to four. Bench your book for you. They're taking your Microsoft Word file, and there they're justifying it. They're changing the line spacing. They're adding these headers here. They're adding the page numbers. You know, it's it's not an easy thing to do after having tried to do it myself. It's really not that simple. Okay, All right, so let's say we've got all of our styles done. We'll go back to our contents are our book, and we can. Let's let's add some back matter here, too. So stuff in the back back matters just the information in the back of the book. Let's say about the author and also by this, but I used to put it. Okay, so we go to the about the author type in your your bio. Here, you can add a picture click here or don't want click up here. I think, uh, at an image. So we'll skip that right now, but you can add your author image here. If you want to add any of your you know, your social media accounts. There we go see how those icons to show up here. If you click on them, that'll take you to the correct pages. Also by this is really great. I would highly recommend you using this if you do use vellum. So if you've got other books in your back catalog, that catalog just means any other books that you already have published ghost stories. That's my book. If you add this information, the ace in the apple I d. In all this. What it will do is it will add a link to this book. So when people are reading this. Say they're reading it on a nook. If they click this, it's going to open that page on the Barnes and noble dot com store. If they're reading it on a Kindle, they click this. It's going to bring them to the page on Amazon. Okay, Um, so this is a great tool. You might want to just give a little brief, uh, blurb. You know, a little bit of information about the book. There we go. So and then add the next book. See how it all it'll formats it for you Really nicely are to go back to some of those other things that I was saying earlier about, like, the Ornamentals and Page breaks it all. It's to see how we have a page break here. Let's say we want to insert one of those ornamental things that I showed you just click on the space here, go up here to this gastric click ornamental brick. And even though this looks like this on the page, it's gonna show up looking like this because that this style that we picked remember the style that we picked. We want the 1st 3 letters after a space to be in all caps. That's showing up here. That doesn't mean we have to put everything in caps. It's just the formatting. Does that for us. Okay, so and let's say let's say we wanna, um and let's make this whole thing right here. Let's say that this is a poem that we want to put in Inverse. If we just highlighted and hit verse Chicken out, see how it looks There it puts it does the formatting for you. It's so simple. This is ridiculous. You know, if we want to see if we were to make it a block quote. Here we go. The next morning, you know, it becomes a block quote again. This this program is just It's so simple is if you can. If you can afford it. I highly recommend you use it because the books look beautiful on E readers. They just do it. It's something that's I feel very confident when I make my e books with Belem that readers are going to enjoy that. Okay, so I think this is pretty much pretty well. And the tutorial when you're ready, Teoh, create your your files just hit. Generates here. Okay, This will generates. Well, let's say continue without saving. I don't want to say this project this will generate files for so you can click Which stores you want to generate files for? I don't sell in Google play because you need invitation only to do that if you want to go direct to Google. So I I didn't create file for that. But, you know, this is where you could make the files for these stores. If you want to add Prince, I don't I'd have to buy it. I have not used the vellum press for prints because I have got the person that I used and they do a great job, so I'm not gonna do that. Okay. All right. And so 01 thing to make sure that you save, make sure you save your project and use a name. You know, if you've got different drafts that you're doing, make sure that you are labeling, which is which. I hear horror stories from people all the time. Like, oh, I went to upload my file to Amazon and it used an earlier draft. It's because the person was, you know, that they were not. They were not labeling their files correctly. And so they made a mistake and picked the wrong file and just became a problem because a whole bunch of people bought the book and they bought an older version that still needed to be edited. So be very careful about this. Make sure you always save everything. This is super easy. Okay, All right. So I'm gonna go. Oh, yeah. And then one of the thing here, too, Just because you open this image, this is what it's going to hold on. Yes, this is what it's gonna look like once they create the files for you. This is what it will look like. So when you generate those files, they'll give you a cover image file, and they're going to give you, like, the e pub that's going toe. That's going to be, you know, show you which store it's for. So kobo here. This is the file that you upload the kobo. This is the file that you upload the Kindle. This is the cover that you would upload the Kindle, you know? So okay, easy stuff. Let's get back to this year. Now we're gonna wrap this up here retired here. My book, My voice. All right, so one tip No, your print book size. This is important because when you format your book for Prince, you're going to give this information to your four matter, or you're gonna need this information yourself when you format, so it's good to note your sizes and then also know what the bigger page counts for. The bigger that your print page counts is, the more money you're book is going to cost when you print it. So if you've got a big, thick book, use a bigger sighs. Maybe go with six by nine, that is, that's probably the biggest size that is still like an industry standard, you know. Also check with your genre. There may be sizes that go better with specific genres. Also, keep in mind that your e book file Um, the bigger the file is, the more money it's going to cost you to deliver that file to customers. So, like on Amazon, they charge you believe it's 15 cents per megabyte, so you want to try to keep that file size as small as possible. So again, consider your Sandra. There may be sizes that are specific to your genre. So so do a search for that. Also, add review blurbs it accolades the front matter of your book. So again, just to be clear, the front matter is all this stuff that shows up in the front the beginning of your book. The back matter is this stuff, and this is just these or just, you know, the book chapters. So this is front matter. This is back matter. Also, add a link to your mailing list in the e book front matter. But I mean by that is here, let me open a recent file, then open. This is the actual file that I used for my book. See, How is this free exclusive offers? I made a graphic here using a website called Can Va, which I'm going to show you how to use. It's really easy, but I need this graphic and I added it. You know, I just added an image. So ended the image there and that I I linked it here to this Web link. This Web link is aligns with my mail chip account. So when people click this, they are brought to a landing page. So this is gonna pull up a landing page where people just type their email address in and they get added to my mailing list automatically. And I start sending them outs e mails automatically based on when they joined that. So this is something I would recommend adding to the front matter of your book. You know, you could just add at a little image for at a link to a landing page where people can get onto your mailing list. This is a way that some authors are making or growing their mailing lists, you know, at ridiculously high numbers. So Okay. All right. So I am. I'm exhausted talking about formatting such a lovely topic there. But I hope this was good information for you again. Please, please leave feedback to if you feel in any way that I can improve on any of this information that I'm presenting to you. Um, you could just leave that in the comments section on the course there. Okay. Next, we're gonna talk about coverage 8. Cover Design: all right. And welcome back to from first draft of best seller, I'm John Le Poma. And today we're going to be talking about cover design. All right, so we've already discussed editing and formatting. This one is going to be a little bit quicker, and so hopefully it'll be a little bit more fun. And so we'll start with Well, there says where to find a designer. But just so to be very clear, that cover design, that's just the design of your front and back cover and also on the spine. If you're just gonna be publishing an e book, then you only need the front cover. However, if you're going to be doing a print book, you're gonna need the front, back and the spine, all right? And so we're going to discuss today where to find a designer. We're gonna try to find designers. They're gonna create beautiful and high quality covers. Okay, so what you can do is check out the copyright page of books in your genre. Eso A lot of times, the publisher will list the cover designer in the copyright section off Ah, book. And so you can just go to the copyright page and look this up. If it's not there, you know, maybe it might be somewhere in the front matter. I recently read a book where the cover designers he signed his name right on the front cover. So a lot of times that information is in the book. You could also check out a website called 99 Designs. So here's here is the website right here? So basically what you do is you creates a brief and so say, for example, you wanna have a cover made in a specific genre. What you do is create a brief and you will connect with designers. It's it's similar to read Z and that you know, you create a brief. You submit the brief to a number of designers, and then they will compete. The send you designs and you pick the one that you like the best, and so you can go down to how much it costs. So this sea air it starts at us to 99. So let's start by choosing choosing a category. So for us, we would want to pick book and magazine, and let's say we want to do a book cover So for the full, we wanted to the full thing. The print cover. You could do a book cover here. So you wanted to book cover design? You just come down here to get a design? Yeah. Then it's just gonna walk you through the process here. Do you want a physical book in e book or both? Let's just say what we want. Both. We changed our minds. We want both copies now, So pick three or more designs to show the designers which styles you prefer. You'll have the opportunity to upload your favorite designs later. So you just pick up the three designs to see to show the designers what kind of styles you like for your book. Let's say we like the day Sonny died. Uh, this one right here and then here we go. Lisa Mills. No place like motor home As we continue pick up the three colors you doing explored, you know? So you just walk through this process and continue filling out your information. Put a title on their the author name. Tell about yourself. This is important. What genre you right in? You know, if you're writing young adults, there are things that young adult readers are looking for on their covers. Basically, you wanted to You want it? You want your cover to stand out. But you also want people to know when they look at your cover. What genre that you write in. So, yes, it just just continue filling out this information. This is 99 designs. This is one way of getting a cover. You could also go to Fiverr. We're gonna do is just go here into this search and we would want book cover design. I can't. Okay, so you'll see a bunch of different designers and you can sample their work. So actually, you know, some of this these air looking pretty good. I think you know that the quality ranges here so you can scroll through like, you want to see what I wanna check outs, Jean ona We want to check out her her work. You could just scroll through it or you can click on the person's, uh, profile there, and it says I will create graphical book cover design and you can just scroll through this and see, you know, she looks like she doesn't pretty darn good job and see, here are the services that she offers. So it looks like, you know, for for 10 bucks, if you're on a bush, it you know, you could You could work with a designer here on Fiverr, and you can read a little bit more about them. Here, you can read reviews when you want to get started. Let's say you you've chosen you made up your mind. You want a toe, hire this person. All you have to do is just click this proceed to order. Well, let's say we want the standard order. Click the order and then proceed to order. And then just, you know, set up what you want. Proceed to the payments. And then from there, they do walk you through the process. So I don't think they're gonna let me continue here without Yes. See, I'm gonna have toe to sign in. Okay, so that's fiber. That's something that that authors use quite often. Ah, And again, the quality does range. There. Sometimes you get I've seen covers people have had made on fiber and I'm just like, you know, it looks like looks like somebody with no design experience made that, but as you just saw There are some pretty great designers on there, so could keep five or in mind read Z again. So instead of just going to the editing, you know, sub header, go to designs. So I showed you guys how to do that in the editing video. That's where I found the designer for my book this summer of Crowd. So that's the design of a summer of crowd. I'm really proud of that one. The designer's name is Sydney Chew. And here, if you look see this look inside feature. I'm gonna click on this and see You can see just scroll down, See on my copyright page illustration by sin you chew. So writers do put this information in the copyright page of their books. So you say you liked that cover, You know you could you could use that, or you could also do it yourself. You could buy a pre made cover. So what I did here is I just did a Google search for primi pre made book covers and this was, I think, the first website that popped up. It's self pub book covers dot com Uh, and so what? You would do is what you get on this site. Just search by your genre. Let's say we wanna do Ah, young adults cover. So they give us all these different samples. I like the one with the monkey so you can click on that. And then what you're gonna do is just customize this cover. So you see here, though, the price is $99. So it's nuts. It's not exactly dirt cheap. You're organized. You'll have to pay. You know that the prices do range. So they're not all $99 at least. Maybe on this website they are. But all right, so all you would do then is just type. See what's his type text one. So you would just highlight this box and say, Monkey businessman, I don't know. I'm just making this up here and you could choose the funds, see all the different funds they have. I don't know. Times New Roman. The thing is about this is that I think it it would still benefit you if you had cover design experience because, you know, I would only recommend this. The people who do have some experience with side because it's it's important to choose the right funds. It's important to choose the right size funds the right color of funds to be able to know where to position these fonts on the page it These are our skills that are necessary for you to creating beautiful, high quality book. So again, Well, one of the objectives of this course is to create a beautiful, high quality book. So if you are not experienced with design, I would avoid the do it yourself covers. I see people showing off their covers all the time on that Facebook group that I'm a part of some look great. Some look like they were made by somebody with absolutely no experience. You know, end you will. You will turn off readers. People will look at your cover. They will not want to read your book. Uh, people absolutely do judge a book by its cover. So again, this this does require some some talent with design. But this is another option. I know people. A lot of people do this. You could make your own again. If you're a skilled designer, go right ahead. You know, there are some people who are great writers and great designers. If you have experience with it, you know, make your own and you would know more about that than me if you're a designer, because I have never made my own cover. I have no talents when it comes to the visual arts. So I always hire somebody to do that stuff for me. All right, so here's some tips. This is really, really important. Consider what's selling in George genre. So look, it covers of other books in your genre. Check out that the top selling books, you know, go to Amazon and I'm gonna go with romance because romance books those seem to have pretty specific things that readers are looking for. You know, you like having the, uh, bare chested macho man. All right, so, you know, they just look through this is ah, great way off. Looking to see what selling in your genre, OK, eso consider what silly in your shot right? That's extremely important. Consider how this will look on E readers. So if you were watching the last lecture on formatting, you'll know that the way that your your book your book is going to show in black and whites on certain E readers. So if if your cover is highly dependent on some color scheme, know that a lot of your readers are not going to be able to see that on their E reader, all right, I mean, they'll be able to see it on Amazon, or they'll be able to see it when they're buying it on the store. But when it's actually on their E reader, it's it's you know it's not gonna have that color, depending on which the reader they use. Also, this is something to consider when you're doing Amazon Marketing Service or Facebook ads. They have specific guidelines for what you can put on a cover or what they'll allow to be on the cover for them to run the ad for you. You know such things is, if there's a gun on the cover, it cannot be pointed at the audience or anybody else that the person has to just be holding it or the others. They're certain restrictions on the amount of skin you can show, just just stuff like that. So keep that in mind and again, readers absolutely will judge your book by its cover. They just will. It does happen all the time. I'm sure you judge books by their cover. I do. So you wanna have a beautiful, high quality cover in order to do the best with with with sales here. Okay. All right. So up next, we're going to discuss reviews, which I think is one of the more fun topics. It's something that readers will traditionally ends ends independently published in all all the writers air looking for more reviews. So I'm gonna give you a whole bunch of strategies for how to do that. So So stick with us, and, you know, we're gonna have some fun. 9. How to Write an Effective Book Blurb: All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna discuss book blurbs. All right, so what is a book blurb? This is just information about your book, right? So you have you seen book blurbs a 1,000,000 times before? Usually it's located on the back cover of a book. So this, you know this right here? This is the book blurb for my book Developing Minds. And if you click here on the back cover, you'll see it's located right there. So again they're usually found on the back cover of the book. But a lot of authors now are publishing e books on Lee. So you would find that information, like right here on a books Amazon Page or Barnes and Noble Page. What? This is not, though. It is not a summary of the book. You do not want to just give readers a summary of your book. You want to be strategic about what you are putting in your book blur. So that really entices readers to want to buy. All right, now, here's some information on how to write an effective book. Blurred. So I'm gonna go over all of this information, and I'm gonna show you what it looks like on my blurb for my book Developing Minds in American Ghost Story. All right, so you want to introduce your character? What does he or she want? You want to basically give the reader a perspective on what is going on here, and so we can start by introducing the read the character and what they want. And then what is the conflict? What stands in his or her way? Now this just doesn't have to just be for one single person. You could be discussing a group you could be discussing some military regimen you could be discussing presidential administration. You know, it doesn't have to just be about what he or she wants or his or her way. It can be about what the group wants and what stands in the group's way. Okay, so that's not just a singular thing here also introduced the setting, especially if it's really important. So tell us is, Is this happening in some futuristic world? Is it happening in present day Washington D. C. But is there some elements of of Washington D. C that's been fictionalized? You know. So if it's an important element of your story, make sure to include that. That setting also tell us a little about the plot. Mind you, this is not a summary, but tell a little bit about the plot so readers can have a better idea about what is going on in this story. But don't get carried away with this. All right? Keep it toe like a sentence or two. Also introduced the genre tone and thematic contents, and you don't want it to this in a heavy handed way. You could just do this in, like, a word or two, OK? And also let the readers know what the book offers to then. All right, so here is my book Developing Minds in American Ghost stories. Amazon Page. And as you see, I didn't include some information above the blurb here about it being a number one Amazon Amazon best seller and about it winning a few awards. You are not allowed to put book blurbs. I'm sorry you're not allowed to put review blurbs up here, So if Kirkus Reviews says that you had the greatest book on Earth, you cannot put a blurb from that review up here. Let's against Amazon's terms of service. Okay, so here is the the blurb for developing minds in American Ghost Story. I'll read this to you. So Developing Minds and American Ghost Story follows a group of recent college graduates who struggle with feelings of alienation and their addictions as they try to survive a year of teaching at two dysfunctional Miami public schools. So I didn't tell you who this book is about. A group of recent college graduates. I did tell you about the conflict there, struggling with feelings of alienation and their addictions as they try to survive a year of teaching at dysfunctional Miami public schools. And I also introduced the setting Miami. Now, here's a little bit more about the book. Here's Here's an introduction to the character, as well as a little bit of summary about it. A poetic and insightful coming of age novel. Developing Nines is set centred on 24 year old Luke Until Lucky, an aspiring writer who sees his creative output suffer when he begins teaching at one of Miami's most challenging middle schools. As the year progresses, however, Luke begins to relate to the neglect and abuse his students suffer and is faced with a haunting decision. Continue to let his dark past destroy him or rise above this struggle to realise his potential as an artist and a real human being. All right, so in that paragraph is a lot happening here. Noticed this, a poetic and insightful coming of age novel right here. This information this is giving us more about this story. It's poetic and insightful, and it's a coming of age novel, so this is not scifi. It's not. Romance is a poetic and insightful coming of age novel. It also gives us information about the main character here, 24 year old Luke Until Lucky, an aspiring writer who sees his creative output suffer when he begins teaching at one of Miami's most challenging middle schools. Right, so again, we're introducing character and conflict, and we're also giving plot here. As the year progresses, he begins to relate to the neglect and abuse of students suffer. All right, so, again, this is there's a lot going on, and just these two paragraphs, but keep its keep its simple keep it concise, and by simple I don't just mean, you know, basic in terms off of skill. You know, make sure you're using strong words. Make sure you're using action verbs. Make sure that you are keeping this moving along. All right, All right. See this third paragraph down here, this is gonna answer what this book offers for readers. It also tells a little bit more about you know, the tone of it. So it's equal parts disturbing and humorous. Developing minds offers a brutally honest look at the American public school system and the extreme measures many teachers take to cope with working in it. All right, so, again more about tone here, it offers a brutally honest look. So this is this is when readers they get to this part. You know, maybe they've read the 1st 2 paragraphs, and they're still kind of on the fence about this story. When they see this last part here, they're they're realizing that. OK, well, if I buy this book, I'm gonna get a little bit more insight about some of the problems actually plaguing schools today. So you're giving them a benefit of reading the book as well? You're not just entertaining them. You're giving them something new. All right, And that's where your knowledge of this story, why your book is important, that is going to come into play here. Okay, so brainstorm. What? What is it about your book that is unique? That is a benefit to readers? What? What can they take away from this story that they might not get from any other story? Okay, all right. And keep in mind, it doesn't have to be three paragraphs. I just did it in three paragraphs because I like to break up this information. I don't want to just have one big, solid chunk of writing. I think it's easier for for readers to digest now. I got some tips for you here. Read blurbs of other books in your genre and even outside of your genre. You know, get some. Get an idea of what's other blurbs will look like and check out some of the best selling books in your genre to see what their blurbs look like. Also used strong words. Instead of saying the character walks say he strolls instead of saying character eats, say he devours Yeah, this is where you can use strong action verbs or words that are more consistent with the theme and tone of your story. Keep it toe 150 words or less again. I know when you're getting into this, you're just gonna want to tell the whole summary of your story. Hold yourself back from doing that. Just give readers enough information for them in their head to picture what this story is about. Tellem selling the genre. Tell him what it offers them and then stop. You know, don't don't get carried away with this. They're going to stop reading after 152 100 words, and you don't want that right, so keep it concise again. This is not a summary and brainstorm. The most important elements of your book brainstorm character quirks, brainstorm, thematic material, brainstorm benefits that potential readers might gain from your story. Brainstorm. What's unique about your book. Brainstorm. Just the feeling that you think readers will get reading this book and write this stuff down. You know, Askew saw in my book, I put a poetic and insightful book. It's disturbing and humorous, you know. So this gives readers a little bit more information about that story, and it gives it information about what the the book can. What benefits the book and have to them and think like a new reader. Try to imagine you're coming to this story for the first time yourself. Okay, and what would What would entice you to read this book? Also do a B testing. Read a couple different blurbs and see which ones are the most popular with your family and friends. Pitch them to groups on Facebook and see. See what people say about them. All right, pitch them to people on your mailing lists and see what they say about them. And also make sure to proof Read this. This might be the only thing people read of you. You know, this might be the only thing people read of your novel. So if it is not proofread if it's filled with errors, if it's if it's just not written well, people are going to think that your book is filled with errors and your book is not written . Well, make sure to proof. Read the hell out of this. This blurred. Have your editor take a look at this too. Every time I before I've I've finalized my blurbs. I have asked my editor to review it, and each time they should have just done it for free. You know, I've offered to pay them, but they each time they've offered to do it for free because it's it's so small. But it is extremely important. Also, I think a good tip, too. Having your editor proof read your blurred. After they've read the story, they could tell you whether or not this that blurb does this story justice, they can tell you whether or not you know your your misleading readers. I did write a blurb for my book Understanding the Alec Ran. And when my editor read it, he said, You know, you're making it seem like all the characters here are are like meth addicts, and they're not, you know? So rewrite this this section and I did. And it helped me not to mislead my readers. So, you know, use that as a tip to use that as a resource. Okay, up next, we're gonna discuss reviews which I know is probably one of the juicier topics that that, you know, you maybe you guys dove right into this topic right away and skipped ahead to it. So, um this is extremely important. There's a reason why authors put such emphasis on getting reviews. And I'm gonna show you how to how to get reviews. I'm gonna give you tips on what to do. Once you've gotten those reviews, I'm gonna give you tips on how in the future to to make the process of giddy reviews easier . So it's gonna be a long lecture, but it is filled with information, so make sure you check it out and hope to see you. 10. How to Get Lots of Credible Reviews, which Increase your "Social Proof": All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. Today we're gonna be talking about reviews. Reviews are extremely important to new authors in that they give you social proof or they give your books social proof. So, for example, a reader comes to your page on Amazon or Kindle or whatever. I'm sorry, Amazon or kobo, where? Whatever. And they've never heard of you before. Which, you know, is that a knock to your ego. But when you're a new writer, you know people. Most people aren't gonna have heard of you. So when readers see that you have a bunch of reviews and you know, you know, they're mostly good, that's going to to make that reader more likely to buy your book. So, you know, that's that. Is this white writers they put in such effort to get reviews? Generally, you know, the more reviews you have, the more sales you will likely have. It's not Oh, it doesn't always work like that. And reviews are also important in order to to get accepted into add websites. So, you know, getting accepted by websites like book bub or E Reader news today, where you can advertise sales of your book and that stuff that I'm going to talk about it in in a future lecture. So So don't worry, I'm not gonna discuss it here. You can get that information in my lectures on running ads. OK? All right. So, you know, obviously reviews there so important. But where do I find reviewers? Okay, so one place that you confined reviewers is on a website called the Indeed View, which is a blawg, or it lists. It's it's, ah, database that lists reviewers. So here we are, the Indy view. So if you scroll down, it gives you a list of book bloggers, and it's broken down into what genres these these bloggers typically or they'd like to read in ends. It's got links to their websites. It tells where they post reviews, and also you can search by genre. Let's say you write young adult books, so just just search for young adult, you see, and you can search through all these different reviewers to read more about them. I already chose one that has a pretty clear review policy, so, you know, if you want to just click one of the links. This will tell you what the reviewers policy is. So I just found this one so that this review policy review status being very selective. So keep in mind, it's it's probably be very difficult to get your book chosen by this reviewer. I'm still considering all boys sent to me. And so email me like normal. But I'm being very selective about what? Except right now. And so you can read here. If you ignore me here, I'll ignore you. Yes, that sounds harsh, but I get nearly 70 requests a day. So keep in mind that these bloggers they do get a ton of requests and each of them has got different review guidelines. So make sure you read through what they have to say. Some of them want specific E book files like Moby or PdF. Some of them want print copies. Some of them wants you to email. Ah, blurb to them about your book. Some of them want you to fill out contact forms on their sites, you know? So read what the review guidelines are and stick to those. All right, So she's saying she would like you if you would like to request the review of your book. Please email the following to this email. Please address me in the email. I'm not a fan of getting dear blogger or high, so that's another big thing. Make sure that you personalise your queries to these people, as she says here I hate. Requests that aren't personalizing won't reply to them. So don't just copy and paste one standard email message to all of these reviewers because you know, they know that's what you're doing, and they're not going to respond to that. So personalize it, reach their website a little bits. Get to know that person's interests and see if you can, you know, like maybe they love figure skating or something. And you used to figure skate. And, you know, you could maybe start your email by the discussing that you know, and then get into the your pitch. Also, don't be rude. Don't be nasty. Don't be pushy. If they give you a bad review, don't requests for them to change it. You know they have to respect bloggers privacy. You have to respect their opinions, respect their guidelines. So this is one way of getting reviews is by contacting bloggers individually, and you could do that through this website here. Finding a lot. Bloggers make sure you're keeping spreadsheets with all of this. Whenever you query a blogger, write down the name of the blood. Write down the date you queried them, you know, write down what version of the book you yet gave them. It's a print book, e book, whatever. Just keep all of that information because you will get overwhelms with this. And then I also keep if they give a positive review or not, because then you can come back later on. And, you know, for future books, just scroll through your spreadsheets, see who actually reviewed the book seat, who gave you good reviews and then just query them with your new book. Now, just to let you know this is my experience with doing this. Before I published my first book, Developing Minds. I spent about six months well, about six months before the book's publication date, querying bloggers from this site and a few others. No, I would I would try to do about five every night, and I stopped after 250 or so ends ID say about one in 10 responded saying that they would review my books. So you're not 20 about 25. And Total said that they would review my books. But then maybe one in five of those actually did review the books, and a couple of them were not positive reviews. So for me, it was kind of a waste, Not kind of. It was an extraordinarily large waste of my time. I did make some good context, but like I said, I spent months doing this. But there are better ways of doing it. Okay, I'm gonna show you some of those. All right. Net galley. This is where you if you get your book on net daily, you will get a ton of reviews. Very likely. So All right, this is net galley. It's a website where you upload your book and information about your book and bookstore owners, Librarians, people in the media and reviewers all can download your book ends, leave reviews, or they if they If they're booksellers, they can buy copies of your book. Librarians will buy copies. You get a whole bunch of great data. Whoever downloads your book, you get their email address, you get to see what country they live in. And I've had people from the library Congress download my book. Somebody from Google Play downloaded the book and another. There are people from the traditional media on Net galley. So you list your book there and it's very possible it's not very possible. It's possible that a prominent person can can take a look at it, and that could really kick starts. The publicity for your book so net daily. It's a very important website that a lot of people use. I'll show you. I I listed my book developing minds here on it, Miss. This was a previously available title, so it's archived now. But if it wasn't archive, you'd see there's a thumbs up and thumbs down here for the cover image. And I think I had all thumbs ups. There would be like 40 or 50 thumbs ups and zero thumbs down, and they could put a description note from the publisher. He's available for interviews, block tours, blah, blah, blah. Put in some blurbs for advanced praise Bio, which is way out of date now links to the books page on Amazon and good reads I S B A. In addition, price. Here's the problem. So right here's the benefit of the drawback. I had 24 members review my book, but with an average of three stars now, this might be different for you, but I have heard a lot of people giving similar information about net galley. Now Net galley. They take pride and saying, That's all. We do not have trolls like people don't just, you know, like they would do on Facebook. Just gang up on authors and give them bad reviews, which I'm not saying that that happens here on that galley. I think, though, because of the nature of what Net Galley is, I think that's there are people who are much more critical of books on that galley cause I found with my book developing minds and with the Summer of Crowd, I put that on that galley as well. People are much more harsh on these websites than anyplace else on a Net galley, and I think part of that is that you're offering the book to them for free. They really you know, it's the barrier between the reviewer and your book is unless is not existent unless of course, you can set it up where you can improve. Who reviews your book? I have just let whoever review the book, which maybe accounts for some of the lower rating. And I also think that because there it's, it's impersonal. That's these people are not interacting at all with you before getting the book. I think to It leads to some of them giving poor reviews. And also, I think there are a lot of people on here who just scanned books. You know that they might download 20 of these and then they just go through all of them in a few weeks so you could potentially see some harsh reviews. However, you could see some amazing results. Now I've had a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have come to my book Important people, booksellers and librarians. People have just ordered their books for the libraries or have ordered it to bookstores. I've already had 28 Prince orders for my book this summer of Crowd, and I think it's all because of Net galley because booksellers air on there and they're looking at and they're not necessarily contacting you and saying Hey, we love your book if they like it, they might buy copies, you know. So that's a benefit. One of the other things said that are important to sit to tell you about. Net Galley is that if you want a list directly with Met Galley, you have two options, and these options are this, you know? So keep that in mind. You know, you have to take out a second mortgage on your house toe list your book here or if you're a member of the International Book Publishers Association, which I am, are the Independent Book Publishers Association. I'm sorry, um, you could do a three month title listing for $199 which is what I did with my book, and they take care of. They take care of all of its I have not listed a total myself on Net galley, so I don't know what the process is, but I would imagine they'll walk you through it if you choose to go directly through them. If you go with the IBP A, they will take care of it for you. You give them your book file and your information, and they'll set it up for you and then they will also give you reports whenever you he wants to see who's downloaded your book. Ah, what feedback you're getting on the book. People will tell you things. Like what brought them to downloading your book? Was that the cover? Was that the author? Was it that that you keep hearing about the book, you know are the blurb. So you get really valuable information about why people are picking up your book. So it's not. I think that Gailey has got a number of wonderful benefits, so it's something to consider. It is expensive, and you could potentially be opening yourself up to some bad reviews. But you could also be opening yourself up to some wonderful possibilities. So please keep that in mind. Just just consider it okay? Good. Reads groups now, I told you. You know, when I went used the Indy view, I had very minimal results. But taking like, ah, half hour and posting in good reads groups, I was able to like quadruple the number of reviews that I got. All right, So I'm gonna show you this here. Where's my right? So already logged into good reads here. This is my account. So these are all the groups that I'm a member off. But see, here there there are groups like a RC of authors read for review, good reviews, authors and reviews, book giveaways, good reads reviewers, groups. I did a search for reviewers, and I looked to see which of these would be good fits for me. And I joined these groups, you know? And so let's just click on Air Sea of Authors. You could join these groups, read their guidelines. That's very important. So see where it says advanced review copies. Read me first. They will give you guidelines for each of their pages. And so make sure you read what they have to say. There are specific guidelines for how to post, but all you you have to do is you know, if once you've followed the guidelines, you know you could just post post your air sea review copies here, so it's just check this one out. Says Person is requesting reviews for their book, Cobweb Bride, All right, And then, if people are interested, they can. They can responds and say, Hey, you know, send me a copy of your book and so I I have found more reviewers on good reads groups that I have from querying bloggers and the people I found on good reads have overwhelmingly liked my books versus the people on Net galley. So it's like the good reads. Reviewers sort of balance out the negative reviews I've gotten from Net Galley, and I think part of that is, I have already established a relationship with these people on good reads by interacting with them a little bit. And so it's not just this colds process off them. Downloaded a book for free taking like a two second look at It and decided All this is stupid one star. You know which people will do stuff like that. Okay, so good reads groups. You can run good reads and library thing giveaways Now Good Reads recently changed their give away program to where they charge, I think 100 about $120 for you to list your book for a giveaway, which is absurd. I think I'm going to stop doing them because it's it's way too expensive for minimal results and just the principle of that, you know, they're trying to milk money out of out of authors, and it's a great program. You know, you could list your books for free. You can get him into reader's hands, but I'm probably gonna stop doing them. You can also do library thing giveaways. Now, I am not gonna get into this this here because I do have a section on good reason library thing, and I'll explain that stuff there. Also, the Independent Book Publishers Association has got catalogs that you can Mr Books in. So again you would have toe you would have to be a member off. The International book publishes are Independent Book Publishers Association, which is I forget the prices, like $125 per year. But you will more than make up for that money in savings for all the different benefits. I mean Goto membership here and look at the member benefits there. There are so many benefits, it's, you know, I would recommend signing up, um, for them So you can. This is one of the things you could do is get your books in there. Books for review catalogue. These go out to Let's see, they say, how many reviewers Oh, so approximately 3000 reviewers, journalists and bloggers in the US Um, thing is, it's 210 bucks, so there's a cheaper option here for the American Booksellers Advance Access program. So this is also an IBP A program, and it's $75 and see. It also sends your book to the American Bookseller Association to bookstores that want to receive galleys. Reading copies finish reviews. So these are These are just a couple of ways that you can get reviews. Okay, Also, when you start building your mailing list, you can set up a group. You know what some people call it a street team. I call it a reader's group for my readers team. Were you ask people in your subscribers or your subscribers if they would be interested in joining your street team, where they would get free copies of all your books in exchange for reviewing leaving reviews, and I'll show you how to set that up when we get into the mail chimp mailing list section. Okay, so this is this is a way you can get refused as well now to get editorial reviews. If you want to get reviews from places like Kirkus REVIEWS SAN Francisco BOOK REVIEW US Review of Books You know, etcetera. So here I just have that. The San Francisco Book Review Page open here. So this is one place where you can get editorial reviews. So is this submission guidelines. So you can either submit the book for a general submission, and they'll consider reviewing it for free. You know, see, just fill out the form and follow. Follow the instructions so bluh, bluh, bluh or you can choose a sponsored review because there's no guarantee that your book will get reviewed if you just send it to them for free. To get a guarantee review, you can pay, you know, 100 out 199. So this is just again. It's another option when you get your book into. If they give you a favorable review, they they in their readership. They've got librarians and booksellers and all of that. So this is This is a way to get your book's reviewed by reputable sources, so these are ones that you can then put on the back cover of your book or put on your website. Or you can use these when trying to sell to booksellers. It's gonna be much more impressive. Toe a bookseller that you have got a glowing review from Kirkus than that you have a glowing review from some reviewer on Good reads. You know eso it gives you some credibility. Also, one thing about these just because you're paying for them does not mean you're going to get a good review. So this it's difference. This is different than paying for reviews. I mean, there are There are shady people out there who, if you pay them money, they will give your book glowing reviews. That's not the same thing here. You're basically just paying for these organizations to review your work. They by no means are just going to give you positive reviews. Uh, anybody who has ordered a Kirkus review would know our most. A lot of people who have ordered Kirkus Reviews will know that's they are really nasty, all right, so there's no guarantee you're going to get a positive review. I got lucky with Kirkus. They have recommended two of my books, which is is huge, and I know that that has helped me to get my book sold in stores. Booksellers know the name Kirkus. Librarians know the name Kirkus. It's a huge name in publishing, so if you can get recommended by them, that's going to make your life a lot easier when you're trying to sell your book toe. Two librarians, booksellers All right, so here's some tips. Again. Be respectable of reviewers guidelines that's really important. Do not exchange reviews with other authors, so this might seem like a really good idea. You get a couple of authors together and you say, Hey, you know, I'll read your book and you read my book and we'll just give each other five star reviews. This is against the terms of service on Amazon, and this will get you reviews deleted on Amazon. It's just bad practice. Just just don't do it. Do not pay for reviews Now. This is different than the editorial reviews that I just told you about paying for reviews , to be like, you know, you're paying some guy on five or five bucks to give you 10 positive reviews on Amazon, you know, don't do that. You will. Your book Look it take removed from Amazon are not your book, but you're You actually could get your book review from banned from Amazon. Doing stuff like this, it found there's an author named Jon Bloch who was found having paid for, like, two or 300 positive reviews for his book, and that became a big scandal. Just don't do it. Also, don't beg your friends or family members for reviews. It might seem like, you know, given that they would review your stuff so that the said the harsh truth of the matter is your friends and family. They're very likely to be very busy people, and they may love you and they may care for you. But it's You may find that it's very difficult to get them to spend the time to give you reviews or help you out with your marketing or all this stuff. You know, they have busy lives. You can't just rely on them to do this. Also, it's against the terms of service on Amazon to have your friends or your family or close friends review your books. So just, you know, and don't don't don't beg them. You're gonna drive them nuts and they're gonna age so that they were going to dread every time one of your books comes out because you're just gonna be, like, just whining and trying to get them to help you out. So do share blurbs of good reviews on your website on social media and then add good blurbs to the back of back of your book cover and then to the front matter of your book. And I showed you how to do that in the ah formatting section, all right, and so also set up a Google spreadsheet or just a spreadsheet with reviewer information that is huge you are going to get overwhelms with, you know, all the people yuk worried ends all the difference organizations that you sent your book to . When did I send it all? They said their reviews come back in 7 to 9 weeks. Well, I didn't mark down when I sent the book, you know? So get in the habit of writing down who you mail books to. When what format? You gave them the book and then write down the results once they get the results. Once you get the reviews, that's really important because then you'll find out who's who's on your side, you know, and then you could come back with future books, and it makes so much easier when you have new books. It is just makes things so much easier. When you know already who the people are, who liked your stuff, you could query them. And in two hours, you can You can get a whole bunch of good reviews for your books. That might have taken you two months before, All right? And so we discussed how to get reviews. Next, we're gonna discuss how to deal with negative reviews. So unfortunately, they come with the territory. Hopefully that you will not get in these yourself. But if you do, I'm gonna show you some ways of dealing with those next. All right, so I hope to see you next time until they have a great day. 11. How to Deal with Negative Reviews in Positive Ways: All right. Welcome back from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Lymphoma. And today we're gonna discuss how to deal with negative reviews, all right? And something that's extremely important here. Do not respond to negative reviews. Now, I know that when when you see a negative review, your first instinct is just too right back to the person, like, you know, screw you. You don't know what the heck you're talking about. You know, you're idiots. Did you really read my book? You know, you might scream at the computer screen. You might add it up. Just do not. Whatever you do, don't respond to a negative review. The reason why is first of all, readers have the rights to have an opinion of your work. So if they're if they're just giving their opinion of your work and they don't like it, they have the right to do that. And you don't have a right to yell at them for, you know, also, in some instances of websites like good reads, you know what? When an author has interacted with the reviewers, uh, sometimes they're they're been examples where the reviewers have have gotten their friends to gang up on that author, and they all just start giving that that author one star reviews and just leaving scathing reviews, you know, and you don't want to invite that kind of negativity onto yourself. You know, you worked so hard in your book. You put together a quality product. You got somebody who's giving you a bad review that's gonna sting for a little bit. Just let it pass. One thing you can do to is if you want, it responded. You know, just don't don't respond to the person, but if you want to write a response, type up whatever you want to say to this person. But then at the end just highlighted and delete it. You know it allows you to get it out of your system and said, And if you check out my good reads page my Amazon pages, you'll see I get quite a number off poor reviews, I think more than most in that I writes books that are character driven and knots plot driven. So I write literary stories and I think you know, from what I've seen, I think more literary stories get they get critiqued a little bit harsher. They get judged harsher. And so you know, there are people who also there are people who who don't like swearing. And I my books are full of curse words. People don't like sexual situations, and I write graphic sex scenes. Some people don't like drug use, and I have got characters who are heavy. Drug addicts are alcoholics. I write characters who are mentally ill. Uh, we're living on sort of the merchants of society, so I do hear people all the time. My main complaints are too much swearing, too much sex. These characters are unlikable and nothing happens. So those those are the main reasons why I get poor reviews now. These are things that you're gonna want to keep in mind to when thinking of advertising and targeting your books to readers. Because you know, if if you're writing certain genres like maybe romance, it's important to let readers know if you're writing clean romance. You know, if you're writing books that have got steamy sex scenes or if they're, you know, if the sex is implied, or do readers know if if there's our readers know if there's gonna be vulgarity in your books, you know So you might want to keep this in mind when you're thinking of how you present your information to readers, your when you're writing your blurbs and all that, because one surefire way to get poor reviews is to, you know, have have readers have a different idea of what the book is, then what it actually is. And that's where you're going to see a lot of negative reviews. One reason why I don't necessarily put that on there. And this is more just for creative artistic reasons. You know, my own sense of integrity is that I don't I don't want to limit my books to just certain readers. I want everybody to read my books, even people that don't like him. I think that sometimes the people who don't like him are the ones that that I want to read them the most. So I don't I don't want to just censor my work. I don't want to just show it to certain people. I want everybody to read it and I want to irritate people I like. I like seeing my book get under people's skin. I just had a reviewer on good reads Leave a two star review for my book. But she said that she was Tauron up in knots over the book. You know, she was. She didn't leave the review for like a week because she kept going over it in her head. She wasn't sure she wasn't sure whether it was. You know that there's something really profound going on there or nothing, you know, and that's that's the reaction that I'm I'm hoping for with my work, you know, I want I want to shake people up. I want to get them to see the world in a different perspective. I wanted Teoh introduce them to the types of characters that they may not normally interact with on a daily basis. So that's why I you know, and I again I get a lot of negative views. I still have mostly positive reviews, but I do have a lot of experience with that. So I know is, well, as anyone what it feels like to get negative reviews, you want to scream at people you want to say, especially when people say things like, Oh, well, why didn't the character do this? And you want to say they did do this. They did this three times on page 39 42 57. You know, read. Read the damn book. Open it up and re read it. You know, that's frustrating, but just let it go. Just let it go. It's not gonna do any good to you there. There are viewers very unlikely to change it. Maybe they are just being a troll. Maybe they are just in miserable person, and they just want toe piss you off. You know that is possible. But if you respond to them, then you might just be taking the bait. And you might just be making your life a whole lot worse. So do not respond to negative reviews. And I think a good way that was Teoh respond internally to negative reviews. If this see why they upset you so much isn't because you feel a lack of confidence in your writing. Is it because they may be triggered some emotion inside of you that you feel like you don't deserve love or that you feel like you're a fraud or whatever. You know, I think it's important for us when we x when you know where we experienced negativity for us to see how we're responding and to understand why we're responding this way. And if you can figure out why you're responding, sort of that way, sort of trace back the roots to understand where that that anger, that fear that that vulnerability is coming from then in the future, reviews future negative reviews. You'll be able to respond to them much more appropriately. You will not get upset. You'll see it as more of an objective process. You'll see. It is more like when you get a group of friends together. Some of them want to get Chinese. Some of them want to get Mexican. Some of them want to get Italian. You're not gonna please everybody all the time, you know, So just keep that in mind with the negative reviews. You know, it's it's not personal. It's your not You're not unworthy as a writer. Sometimes there is good information if there that that they give to you that you may be able to use to improve your writing. So if that's the case, take the good information and then just leave all the rest. But I think a good exercise is to figure out why it is that we're responding so strongly and to to work on that in the future. Okay. And just to sort of go back to what I was saying earlier about managing your expectations about nobody owe you anything, Nobody owes you positive reviews. Nobody owes you a damn thing in this in this world, you know? So we just need to find better ways of responding to negativity. All right, up next, we'll be discussing I s bienes, which I'm aware isn't the juiciest of topics. However, it is an extremely important topic. So I hope that you'll stick with me and check this one out. And until then, I hope you're having a great day. 12. What are ISBNs, and Do I Even Need One?: right. Welcome back to from first draft of best seller I'm Jonathan La Poma. And today we're going to be discussing I s B ends. So what is an I s bien? The International standard book by book number I ESPN is a 13 digit number that uniquely identifies books and book like products published internationally. So I got this information from the ESPN dot org's website and the purpose of the eye. ESPN is to establish and identify one title or addition of a title from one specific publisher and is unique to that addition allowing for more efficient marketing of products by booksellers, libraries, universities, wholesalers and distributors. So in this, basically, it is a number that categorizes your book internationally. So let's say you set this number up in the United States booksellers and librarians in China, Russia or France. They'll be able to scan that number into their system and they'll be able to get yours books, information, and you only need one version there, one for each version of your book. Now, keep in mind that that the prince copy of your book that is one version and the e book is another. So if you're going to be selling a prince book and an e book version, you're going to need to I s bienes All right, so the price is pretty hefty here in the United States to buy one I ESPN is $125 USD 10 is $295.100 is 575. Now, if you just do some basic math and divide 1 25 by one, you get 125. So the price for buying one is $125 Pariahs bien. However, if you buy 100 5 75 divided by 100 is $5.75. So, as you see the price per ESPN drops dramatically, the more that you buy. So if you are planning on publishing a number of books, I would recommend purchasing I s bienes in bulk, and they are free in some countries. So this information is just being in the United States. Check in your country to see what the price would be. Okay, so now you know what I ESPN is? Do you need an eye? ESPN? No, If you publish with Create space iBooks Nook drafted digital smash words and Amazon You don't need one. And also, this is not a copyright. You're not registering. Ah, copyright. When you set up your ESPN all the I s P n does is it categorizes your book. So if you publish with create space or iBooks, I am sorry if you're if you're selling on these platforms, you are not giving your rights to these platforms. You were just You're just getting a free I ESPN number from them. All right, So if if it's free and it's easy, why would you Why would you want to pay for one? So why might I want one? All right, So this allows you to show up as the publisher, not create space or drafted digital etcetera. All right, now, show you what that looks like. I looked up a book here, a book by Lucy Libido. And when you scroll down to the books information here, you see here where it says publisher, it says create space independent publishing publishing platform. This would alert a potential reader that this book is This has been self published. Now, if that's something that you're trying to get away from what you can do is what I've done here is right. So see here. See the publisher here for my book. It says L'm andro Arts. So that is my publishing company. So it doesn't say Ingraham Spark. It doesn't say Amazon, you know, it's saying the publisher is l'm andro arts and so that that's that's something a lot off self published authors are doing. You know, they're putting their own publishing presses in there, sort of t get away from this stigma. That there book has been self published, all right, And so also what the ESPN looks like just in case you were wondering, you know what it looks like in book form? It's It's this here. This is OK, so this is a bar code, by the way. But the barcode is like a a visual representation of the eye. ESPN. So the ESPN is just this 13 digit number here. So this is the one that categorizes the book and this barcode when when booksellers or librarians or whoever scan this book, your books information will come up into their system. This little section here, this is actually the price of your book. The five here represents the currency. So five is that is the code for US dollars. And this 12 95 this is the price. So, you see, I had the my book designer, Ed $12.95 us here because that information was not on the barcode. But, you know, if you ever go to a bookstore, look up this If you look up this information here, this is gonna tell you what the retail price of that book is. Okay? And so bookstores and libraries require I s bienes now create space offers free I s bienes for people who publish or prints their books with with create space. So if you're doing the X trend extended distribution option, you can potentially get your book into bookstores. All right, It does. It doesn't necessarily matter where the eye ESPN comes from, but if you want to sell your book and bookstores, you will need an I s bien on that book. And if you want to publish using Ingraham Spark, you absolutely do need in ESPN. All right? And so, for you may want one before peace of mind as well. All right, so No, I said that, You know, you can You can get a free I ESPN from create space or drafted digital or whatever, but let's say let's say you know the worst happens You've published your book with create space Now create space goes under you know, they go bankrupt and they close down. Well, now you know you've got this. I s bien that was that was given to you by create space. So if if if they go under, you're gonna need to get one, you know so and potentially if you're using, like, drafted digital or or smash words. If one of those goes under, you could potentially lose reviews. You could potentially lose your ranking. There was just an e book aggregator called pronoun, which shut down, and people were concerned about losing reviews and maybe losing their rankings. So this is just a piece of mind if you buy your I s bien right from the beginning, you have got that information you know you don't have to worry about You don't have to worry about any any outside parties. You know what happens to any of those outside parties. You have that information and so again, it's just for me peace of mind. And it's much easier to set up than you might think. And I'm gonna show you step by step, how to do that here in a moment and again, you know, you could potentially lose your reviews of the company closes, so just get peace of mind. Okay, So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go through a step by step here, how to set up your ESPN. Now, what you need to do is go to the my identify IRS websites. And so I've included that link in the power point. Scant back to it here. So it's just this. Www dot my identify irs dot com slash Get your ESPN now, So this brings you just to this page and so you'll see the pricing here. You know you can get your one ice being for $125 or 10 for 2 95 So let's say we want to get the 10 package. You know, you could just select by now, or if you want to throw in like a bar code, you could do that to backers. Bunkers is the the company. That's that's isn't that cells? I s B ends. They sell barcodes, so you can also purchase a barcode. If you publish with Ingraham Spark, you will not need a barcode. So you don't have to worry about that. Also, if you want them to register a copyright for you, you can do that too. So they have different packages here. So there's a 10 spn supposed to pot copyrights package. Or, you know, there was the ESPN and barcode package here if you want. You know, if you're a publisher, you're setting up a publishing company and you're going to be publishing a ton of books. You might want to buy a ah package of 1000 I s P N's for 1500 bucks. All right, so let's just say we want toe get our 10. I s P N's for 2 95 just Adam to the cart. Just go through the whole process of buying, All right, then what happened next is you'll get an email from backers and they're going to they're going to confirm your order. You can scroll to the bottom of that order that's gonna take you to this page and it shows if you purchased I s B ends how to assign title data to your I S P N's. This is required in order to be listed in books in print. This is the catalog. This is very important. Is another important reason to register your eyes. Bien is that you get it into this books in print catalog, which is just a massive catalog where you know, booksellers or librarians or whoever they can find information about your title. All right, so another important part of registering and ESPN. So here are the instructions. I'm gonna show you how to do that here. So once you have created and accounts, you are going to log into that accounts. All right. So again, this is all run by Booker. And then when you when you sign up, you know you'll have toe add your your information and your address and all that. And then when you want to actually register your ESPN, though, click this here. This my identify IRS and see how I have registered I s B ends for my books understanding the Alec ran and this summer of crowd and so have registered to for each of them. There's the paperback format and the e book format for each. When you want to assign your title, say you only bought one of these you're only going to see one. You're only gonna see one. I ESPN here. If you bought 100 you'll have 100 here. All right, so now I'm gonna show you how to actually assign a title. So just click here a sign title, then what you want to do is just fill in any information here that's gotta read Asterix. So you'll fill in your title information. You're putting your description. Now here's a tip to I always creates a Google doc. It's got all of my books information. So see how we've got websites here. So this is that websites where the book is on sale and the online retailers here are just some links to the editorial reviews. I've got my bias that coats which I'm going to show you how to set up here to I've got my I s b ends. Here's the front matter for my book. Just some some of the praise here Dedication, epigraph, copyright information, the back matters got my about the author. Information also by information that cover copy and bio. So it's really helpful to have a Google Dr it just, you know, whatever file with this information. I like Google Ducks because Aiken access this information from whatever computer I'm on. So all you want to do then it's just highlight your books description and then input that information there. It's a copy and paste so that that just fills that information in here. There's no read Asterix for this. You don't have to fill this in, but it's, I think the more information you provide, the better. And then you can upload a cover image. Here, too. You can set the language, you know at information. If you have a Library of Congress control number, great, you get at it there and then go to contributors next. And so here's where you'll add your name and then afterwards check that sure it. Author. If you want to add your birthdate, and if you want to add your death date, go right ahead. The Czech teacher and author again you can copy and paste your bio, then go to formatting sizing, so the medium here. This is where you choose whether or not you've got an e book, a print eBook and audiobook. So that would be considered another format if you're recording audio of your book. So let's just say Let's just go with print here, All right? So you got to come up with the format and let me you I'll advise you here to check if you have any questions. Just just hover over these little, uh, question marks because they'll give you tips or help. So it's saying to choose the bindings most appropriate for the product from the drop down list. This I I have registered paperbacks. If you've got a hardback that would be considered one version and paperbacks that would be considered a version. I only sell paperbacks in E books, so I only need to to I s P n's. So again, if we're gonna be registering a prince paperback, that's what you want to select. You know, you could you could pick all this stuff. You don't need to put it in there. Primary subject. Now we're gonna talk a little bit more about these things when we do by SAT categories, but let's say I do right. Visionary in metaphysical fiction. So let's say that that's the primary subject. And then we'll pick a secondary subject. Let's say just fiction, General, this just helps categorize your book, and then this you can fill in the size details this this information again. This is for this is for, like booksellers and librarians, people who they want to know more information about your book. So the more information you input here, the more information they'll have this information felt. Fill that out. If you feel like it, and additions and volumes feel that information out, then we come to sales and pricing. So where is the site of title sold? I'm selling my books in the United States. Just add your country here in the title status. For most of you, it's probably going to be active record. Add the publication date your target audience. You could add age ranges if you want to. Here, this is where you add your currency. So I you know my would be us deep. Remember, this is for your print version of the book. So my book this summer of Crowd was 12 95. It says don't include the dollar sign price type This is a retail price. All right, so let's see here and then this. If you've got a Siri's, you can put that information in here. You can add your sales writes check here at sales, right. The rights type. I have exclusive rights in Well, I guess it says to specified countries and then you can just put you can choose the world's here if you want to, you know? So this just say that you have that says that you have rights, world rights, and then when you're all done, just hit submit, and it's really that simple. After you submit it, I'm gonna leave the page at a wanna save that, right? So once you submit, see this little circle with the triangle here. That's what's gonna be showing for you. It usually takes a few days to register or update their system with your information. And then what I do is I would just highlight this and then put it your Google duck, you know, So this way you've got you've got your information. This is something that you're gonna there's gonna be valuable when you're setting up your library things and good reads pages and all that. All right, so let's go back to the power point cause I've got some tips here for you. All right, so tips again. Keep your metadata All your books, data on a Google, doc, if you change your I s bien, you could lose your reviews and sales rankings, so use it before you publish and stick with it that this is something that you're interested in using. You know, just just do it right from beginning to give you some peace of minds. And just just to be perfectly clear, though, I know some authors who have got their books that have been published to create space, they have got their books in Barnes and Noble, and these authors have used the I S P M. That create space has given to them. So it's not a requirements, but toe have your own ESPN, but it really might be something that you should consider getting and triple check that you've written your eye ESPN correctly when you're in putting it on stores like Amazon or an Ingram Spark and all that because you don't want to give the incorrect data. And I think it's some places if you put the incorrect information and they won't allow you to change that. So all right, check to see how this is done in your country. It's It's different in all places, and then if you purchase the Ingrams spark, you can get a discount. Also, if you're part of the Independent Book Publishers Association or IBP A, which I showed you about in the reviews section, you do get a discount for registering your purchasing. I s P N's OK, so next we're going to discuss the bisect codes yet I don't know if I'm saying this correctly. Maybe it's it's busy, Zack, Or be suck or baby sick? I don't know. I believe it or not. This has never come up in day to day conversation. This word when I'm speaking with friends so I don't know how it's pronounced. I could be saying it wrong. If I am, I prop, I apologize. Okay, so but either way it's coming next. So brace yourselves and we'll see you next time. All right. Thank you. 13. How to Determine your Book's BISAC Codes, and Why these are so Important : all right. And welcome back to from first drafted bestseller I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be discussing be sacked. Codes be suck whatever you get the point. Right. So bisect codes. What these guys are they? This stance for book industry standards and communications? It's an industry list of subject descriptors, each approved of which is represented by nine character alphanumeric code. And so I showed you what these look like in my previous lecture and I s B ends. But just to let you know again, Um, that's this here. So see, we got thick for fiction and then it's got a code here. So it's Alfa numeric. And I got this information by the way out from this link. And so we're gonna go there here in a moment. All right. So many businesses within the book industry, including Amazon, Baker and Taylor Barnes and Noble books, can Boeker indie bounds into Go Ingraham and most major publishers use the headings any variety of ways. So it's important. So why these are important is because it gives those people more information about how to categorise your book. I mean, clearly, there, there, there, tons of difference categories out there. You could be reading cookbooks or home and garden books or or nonfiction historical books. You know that there are so many different categories of book. These codes are gonna help these people to know what your book is, what it's about. All right. So I'll show you how to set these bad boys up. All you want to do is select a major heading. So sure, I'm gonna show you how all this looks here in a second. Then select the specific term and be specific about herbs are not. Bowker of the Bisek website recommends for you to be specific. And they also recommend for you not to select more than three of these. OK, so we'll go to the website here, So it's just be I s g dot org's ah slash page slash B I s a C edition. All right, This is a list of all the different categories they have. So it's showing here, you know, they've got this two step process for choosing your code. Um, here. And if you have more information or more questions, just click here on the frequently asked questions link. So step one, it says determined the major heading, which best describes the content of your book. So we'll just click on the major heading. So that mentioned a lot of the people taking this course, probably or writing fiction. So let's let's go with fiction here. And then it says, Step two, determine the specific term which describes your book. And so again, the website recommends you to be a specific as possible. So you know, if if you're rating um well, maybe general fiction, but it's also, you know, about Amish and Mennonites. But, you know, topics go with this one above general fiction. You know, try to be a specific as possible with yours. I have used this category the past, the coming of age for my books. I have also used the Was it the visionary metaphysical I've used literary. I believe that there is a visionary and metaphysical. Yes. So this one, this is this is quite a small category, so I usually use that because my books fits this category. All right, so So this is it. You know, you just pick these as you see, you've got your little your major heading category here, and you're more specific one here and and it's important, then just upto write this down in your Google doc, because we're gonna then use this information when you're setting up your book. Unlike Ingram, Spark or, you know it's good to just toe have this information when it comes to picking your Amazon categories and, you know, for you just have started to think about this information. So let's go back tips again. Keep your information on a Google doc and that is it. So the next topic we're going to be discussing here is how to register a copyright in the United States. Very important stuff here, and I'll explain to you why? So we'll see you soon. 14. How to Register a Copyright (in the USA), and Why this is so Important: All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be talking about how to register a copyright in the United States. Okay, so what is copy Break Copper? It is a form of protection grounded in the U. S. Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. So I just got that information right from the U. S. Copyrights website that the fact page basically what this is Is this this when you register capital copyright, it will protect your book. Now it will not protect an idea. So say, for example, you've got this great idea about how a young reporter is bitten by a radioactive beetle and you know, all of a sudden he he gets the strength and power of a beetle. You can't register that idea, but if you write the book, you can register the book. Now your work is protected without one. But registered works may be eligible for statutory damages and attorneys fees in successful litigation. So let's say somebody plagiarize is your book. You walk into a lawyer's office and you let them know Hey, this so and so plagiarized my book. I want toe. Get them to stop. That lawyer may ask if you registered a copyright and they may take on your case based on your answer to that question because they know if if you did register a copyright, um, that they will get their their fees repaid if if they win that case. And so I have heard in the screenwriting world because you could register a screenplay either on the Writers Guild website or you can register our copyright, the US copyright page or both. E. Obviously, you could do them both. But if you're just doing it through the Writers Guild, essentially, you know you cannot. Lawyers will not take your case if you want to sue another writer for having stolen your idea. This is This is just what I've heard from other screenwriters. So this is why I always register copyright. You know, it's it's It's not very difficult. It's, you know, it's it's only $35 so I would just I would very strongly recommend to all writers that you register a copyright and I'm gonna show you how to do it. I'm not going to show you there. I'm gonna give you a power point presentation from the website that's gonna show you how to do it step by step. It's the same power point presentation that I used to set up my books. Also avoid the poor man's copyright. What the poor man's copyright is is Let's say you take a copy of your book, you put it in an envelope and you mail it to yourself. And then when that book comes back to you, you don't open up the envelope. And basically what you're saying is, oh, well, you know if if you ever want to if you ever have to take this your case to court, you can show the judge. Hey, look, I wrote this book and I mailed it to myself. You could see the date that it was mailed. It's unsealed. Clearly, I, you know, have have had the copyright to this book since this date. That's just not gonna hold up in court, all right? And if you're gonna go through all the trouble of going down to the post office and mail in your book, it'll be faster. Just go online to the US Copyright office website and just register your script or your your book or your script as well. And again, it's only 35 bucks at least. Right now it is. All right. So I'm gonna show you how to register a copyright. So we'll start by going to the www dot copyright dot gov website and then we'll click register. We'll click. Log in to the Elektronik copyright office. ICO registration system. Create a new counts click click here beside. For copyright registration questions, download the PowerPoint or PdF with instructions. So here we are at www dot copyright dot gov. So what you want to do is click register. And then, um don't worry about this year, we want to click here to log into the Elektronik copyright office of registration system. All right, so you're gonna have to creating accounts. And once you've created an account, then it will open up. This is this is your, um, your home page here. Your own personal pages welcomes you back here, knows who I am. Um, And so this is where you're going to register your claim. Now. First, I advise you to go to this section here. The four copyright registration information, instructions, helpful ticks, tips, in fact. So click here with this. Out of the way now. All right, on, Ben, go to the ICO tutorials, Standard application. I just checked the, um pdf here basically what? This is this is just a step by step run through of how to do this. And so just follow these instructions. It's gonna give you a series of screen shots which show you how to do all of this. Um, and if you want to just skip right ahead and just grab the link to this. It's just at www dot copyright dot gov slash e c o slash e ceo dash tutorial. Desh standard dot pdf. All right, so this again is gonna walk you through how to do this. I, you know, just I'm not I'm not a lawyer. I don't work here with the US copyright. So I would feel a little bit more comfortable. You getting this information from the copyright office and again, like once it's it's nuts. It's a pretty outdated, uh, website. It really does need to be updated, and it actually has been. Parts of it have been updated since I started registering copyrights years ago. So you know, it's a little bit easier now. Used to be a total mess. It's still pretty messy as you're scrolling through here, you know? So, um oh, and one thing just to let you know, when you when you're choosing your work, because this is this is information about how to register any copyright. So, you know, you come here, register new claim, um, you are going to be registering a work off. It says here a literary work. OK, so that's, you know, that's the one distinction that you'll make here and then at the end, you just when you get to this, that the end here, you just gonna upload your submission and, uh, you pay first, and then you upload your submission. Make sure you don't have pop ups blocked, because if you do, you're not going to be able Teoh access the payments section. Okay. And that's that's pretty much it. Here. Okay, so here's some tips for copyrights. Register your copyright before sending out review copies again. This just this just is another thing for your own peace of minds. Just you never know what could happen with it. Pdf's get Pirated or e books get Pirated all the time. I just for my own peace of mind. I always registered the copyright before sending out review copies. You know that that's just my own thing. And I think it's It's probably not a bad best practice to get into this way. You don't have to worry about anybody potentially stealing your ideas. Also, make sure to add the copyright, you know, then insert the year by an insert your name your copyright page. So I've got an example of that here for my book this summer of Crude. Here's the copyright page says here, Copyright 2017 by yours truly, Johnny Lymphoma and also email the Copyright Office. If you have any questions, they are pretty good about responding to questions, you know. And if they if they find any problems with your submission, they will email you and ask you to update that information. So this is It's not just like some big bureaucratic office. People are pretty helpful. At least they've been helpful with me. And, you know, another tip, which I didn't add on here, too, is that you can, if you're feeling overwhelmed by this like, say, you want to register a copyright, but you don't want to do it yourself. You can always go back to the Baugher's website, and when you're buying your eyes be ends, you know, just have them register your your book for you. Okay. And also your your work will be registered the moments you submit your claim the moment you finalize everything. You won't receive your certificate for a few months, but you will already have protection for your work, so you'll get mailed a certificate later on, and that certificate will have your all of your information on it. All right. Next, we're going to discuss draft to digital versus smash words these air to aggregators. That's a lot of authors use to get their books on a number off online vendors quickly, and they're both great services. We're gonna talk about those, and then after that, we're gonna talk about whether or not there it's better to use those or just to go direct to the online retailers. So stick with me and but let's keep having a good time 15. An Introduction to eBook Aggregators: Draft2Digital vs. Smashwords: All right, Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller I'm John Le Poma. And today we're going to discuss drafted Digital versus Smash Words. Both of these programs are e book aggregators. So what is an E book aggregator? These are websites where you can quickly and easily set your book up for sale on multiple online vendors at once. So you just upload your file to draft digital orders, Nash words, and it will automatically go on sale at multiple stores like iBooks or Google Play or Kobo , even Amazon. Okay. Also drafted Digital will format your e book for free. And just to be clear, we're talking about E books here, not the print version of your book. So this is just the Elektronik form that people will read on on their E readers. You can get a free I ESPN through both of these programs. They offer sales data from each store, so you'll get updates about where your book is selling. They send monthly payments, and they're great for non US writers who have problems getting their books into US stores. So there are some restrictions in certain stores about, um, authors that are outside of the United States publishing their Selves did. This can help other authors outside of the US get their books on these stores. You can choose which stores to sell on. You don't just selling all of them. You choose the price of your book. Still, you also keep the copyright so you're not giving them rights. Toe any of your book or any of your books. Your book is still yours, so don't worry about that. So it sounds too good to be true. So what is the catch here? They take a cut of your sails. So depending on which store it is or which of these websites it is, they're going to take a percentage of the amounts. Are that percentage of the mount that you earn when you sell a book? Also, if they go out of business, you may lose reviews and or sales rankings in these stores. So recently there was a an aggregator called pronoun, which is run by MacMillan, and they they went out of business just last month. I believe January 2018. So it's possible for draft digital or smash words to just up in smoke. But they're both they're both pretty popular programs, so I would imagine it's not gonna happen. But it is possible for that to happen. You also can't run AMS or Amazon Marketing Service ads on Amazon or enroll in Kindle Unlimited. If you're in these programs and that is huge right there, that's that's enough of a reason, I think, for a lot of authors not to enroll in these. I do not use either of them. I upload my books directly to the stores. All right, so which is better for me? Let's say you still want to use one of these e book aggregators. Drafted Digital is a newer website, and it's way more user friendly. It's just very simple to navigate. I don't I don't really even think that you need any assistance from me using it. It's just it's just a piece of cake. Smash words is older, and it looks that way. It looks like one of those old websites from the nineties, so it's it's it's It's not that the nicest looking site Jack Digital will form at the E book for you. You can upload it that dr dot doc exe file and you'll be good to go, you have to format the e book yourself on smash words. So again you can do that using vellum or any of the other programs that I showed you in the formatting lecture it has drafted. Digital has fewer stores, but it includes all the biggest ones. Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble and Kobo. I mean, that pretty much covers, like 90% of the market worldwide, So if you're on those stores, you should be good to go. Smash words is the world's largest e book distributor, but you need to have at least $2000 in sales for them to distribute you on your book. On Amazon, you get Dale's daily sales reports for digital, and in smash words, you can set up pre orders and drafted digital end on smash words. Jeff Digital charges 10% of the repel retail price of your book and smash words. You typically earned 60% of the list price list price on leading retailers. All right, so can't I just sell directly on the retailers like Kobo or iBooks? Yes, you can, and that's what I do so and I want before we wrap up here, I wanna show you these websites. Um, so this this is draft digital here. So this is their website. It says get started here. You can just click that you want to sign up and then it will show you how everything works . Here. Let's say you want a publish. See the step by step process here. So it tells you to set up your account, upload your manuscript, choose your vendors. And these are the vendors. By the way, for draft the digital, you automatically give you an ESPN. You just set your list price. Manage and track your data. Very simple. So sign up. They'll walk you through the process. This is a very easy site to navigate. And if you have any questions, consult the fact page here. So for smash words, as you see, like I said, it's like a really old designed for the website. This one has been around for much longer than drafted digital. And so this seat is a ton off information here. So that getting started, it says, here's first sign up. Then download this smash words style guide for simple instructions and how to format your manuscript as a Microsoft word dot doc file prior to upload. So yes, it is. It is not as simple as drafted digital. You are going to have to tow format that file before getting it up on the site and then click publish. So again, I haven't used either of these sites, so I'm not. I'm not really well versed on how to do this, but it will walk you through the process of getting your book on there. Just sign up. And same thing with Drafted Digital. This one I've heard is really, really easy to get your book set up on. So, you know, And if you run into any issues on smash words, there is the frequently answered questions section here. All right, So I will be going through all of the retailers iBooks and Kobo and all them Amazon. And I'll be sure you step by step, how to upload your books there. Okay. All right. So tips. One thing you know, this is an extremely important thing to to to do is determine your goals as a writer to see which of these stores if either would be a better fit for you and then read the fact on both websites before deciding which one you would like to do. If you want to do one of these for me, I feel it's a no brainer going direct to the stores because you make more money and it also opens you up to opportunities like on Amazon. You can run a M s ads or you conjoined kindle unlimited KDP select it. Also kobo just recently launched or that they haven't launched yet. They're still in the beta testing for ah promotions tab on the dashboard which I don't know if you would be eligible for it using smash words or drafted digital. So weigh your options. You couldn't. You know, if you want toe, If you wanted to just publish on Amazon, you can directly and then use drafted digital for everybody else or all the other websites , you know? So there are options here for you. I just wanted to let you know what those options are so that this way you can determine what which will be best for you. Okay, so next we're gonna talk about going direct. Going direct is Mawr self publishing jargon for setting up your book directly on the stores rather than going through an aggregator, and that's what I do. I have gone direct. All right. So, again, have a great day and I hope to see you for the next lecture going direct. 16. How to "Go Direct" and Why Doing this Can Lead to More Sales: All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna discuss going direct. So what is going direct? This is just self publishing jargon for uploading your books directly on stores like Amazon , iBooks, Kobo and Burns and Noble. So this this just means that we're not using an aggregator program like smash words or drafted digital were just directly uploading. Our files are books onto these online stores. And why should you go direct? Because you will make more money, You have more control and you can run Amazon marketing Service ads and enroll in Kindle Unlimited. Alright. So again, remember, in order to to sell your book on the aggregators, you need to give up a certain percentage of all of your sales. And you know you might not be able to run promotions on kobo and you can't do ads on Kindle Unlimited or MSs. I'm sorry and enrolling Kindle Unlimited. So what do I need to go direct? You will need your tax and banking information, and this is something that you're going to need for for pretty much all of them up. So just have that handy have like a Google doc, just like with your books. Information. Have this information handy. You're gonna need the correct e book files for each store. Now, if you remember back to our formatting lesson, I showed you how on vellum to format e books specifically for each of the stores. So it's best if you have a file that that has made specifically for each of those stores, and you're gonna need a little bit more time, All right? So it's not gonna be as simple as just adding the book to draft a digital clicking a few buttons and that a few days later your book is up for sale on these stores. No doing it direct. You are going to have to spend a little more time for each of these, and depending on the store, it might take anywhere from, like, five minutes up to 15 to 20. So it's not gonna be a humongous time commitment, but it's also not going to be as easy as going with an aggregator. All right, here's a tip. So maybe could have gotten rid of that s Is that have a Google doc with your books information handy because you're going to need it in order to upload to all of these stores , like all the metadata and your synopsis and all that. And also, you're gonna change attacks and banking information. So if that is handy, it's gonna make your life a little a little bit easier. Our next I'm going to discuss how to set your book up on Amazon. So we're gonna tackle the biggest store first, and then we're going to get to iBooks and kobo and nook after that. All right, so stick with me, and I hope that you having a great time to see you next time. 17. How to Set up your Book to be Sold on Amazon's Kindle Store: right. And welcome back to from first draft of best seller I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be discussing how to set your book up on Amazon. And this is very important topic for a lot of writers out there. I know that this is something you've probably been waiting for. Maybe people have even skipped ahead to this section. This is gonna be a lot of information in this topic. So you know, just that I've broken this three Amazon sections up into a few separate lectures because there is so much information and I want to go over all of that as as neatly ends is organized. A manner as possible here. So let's just get into it here, Okay? So to sell your books on Amazon, you're going to need to set up a KDP accounts that's Kindle direct publishing. Now a kindle is Amazon's e reader device. So if if you're not familiar with e readers, that's just what their their devices called ends that requires a Mobi file. If you're remembering back to our formatting lessons. So Katie P is kindle direct publishing. This is where you're going toe upload your e book and all of its information. Her metadata. Okay, So what we want to do to start setting up our book and to start sitting up our categories and all that and all that information, just go to kdp amazon dot com. And this has got in e n underscore us. This is Kindle direct publishing. This is where you publish your book on Kindle. All you have to do is sign in. If you have not created an account, you'll have to create one. Once your sign in you come to this page, this is mine Here. As you see, I've got my books already listed on this site. So when you want to register a new title or t creating a title, just click Kindle e book here. And if you you can also publish paperbacks on Kindle. And so some people are thinking that's eventually this service is going to replace create space because Amazon owns create space. But rights now create space is bigger than then KDP's paperback publishing service. But I'm imagining that the 99.9% of you are interested in this lecture because you want to know how to get your Kindle e book on Amazon. So all you do is quick that. Okay, so see their three things thes three headings they're gonna have to fill out in order to get your book set up on the Kindle store And again, just to be clear, once we complete this process, your E book is going to show up for sale on amazon dot com in it'll show up worldwide if if you choose. If you have exclusive rights worldwide if you if you only want to sell it in certain stores , you can do that too. But this this is how you actually get your book for sale on Amazon. All right, so you start by choosing the primary language for a lot of you that will be English type in your book's title. If you have any serious information, put that in or in addition, number. Put that in. Put your name if there are other contributors and those people as well, and then add your books description. So this is where again I suggest using a Google doc. All right, so publishing rights, if just check which rights that you own If you're publishing a book that's in the public domain. You can also do that. It's gonna affect your royalties, however. All right, so I'm gonna breeze past this right now. We're gonna come back to this because this this is extremely important. As is this here The categories. All right. So the age ridge and the great Earth's age and grade range, So you can select this information if you'd like to. If you want to set your book up as a pre order, you can do that. That just means that your book you know, if your publication date is a few months in the future, you can have your book for sale as a pre order on Amazon or if you want to just release it now you can. Okay, right. So the next section it's not gonna let me move forward with outs putting information in. So what I'm going to do Let's continue without saving. I'm just going to click on my put summer of crowd. So this way I can show you what else to toe to do here without having to actually create this this information or add this information for a book. Okay, so this I checked no for digital rights managements. This is digital rights management is intended to inhibit unauthorized distribution of the Kindle file of your book. Some authors want to encourage readers to share their work and choose not to have DRM implied to their book. If you choose it, customers will still be able to lend their book toe other uses for a short period of time. Once you published a book, you cannot change this. I I forgets the conversation. But I'm There was, ah, thread on one of the Facebook groups that I'm a part of, where authors were were really upset about having enabled this and they wish they had. No, there were a lot of really good reasons for that, and so I forget what those reasons were, but I always check no for it. Here's where your act well, actually upload your e book manuscript. This could take a few minutes once you upload it, and then they will tell you if you have any spelling errors. Now, a lot of times spell years aren't really spelling years, so you can go through there and you can check whether or not you agree or disagree that that that is a spelling air that once you do that, it will update here say that there are no spelling errors. Upload your cover file. If you want to see what your book would look like on a Kindle touch or kindle DX, just click this launch pre viewer, and I would recommend going through that. You don't have to to read the whole book, just kind of skin through it, just to see if there are any errors anywhere, like formatting errors. Maybe like a blank page. Or there's like a huge space between paragraphs. Or, you know, just just look for that kind of information or lack thereof left missing information. And once it looks good, you can feel better about what it's going to look like. People's e readers you can add on ESPN. If you would like to, Amazon will assign you an ace in. That's their method for identifying books. You can also add a publisher, if you would like okay, so this brings us then to pricing it says territories. Here. I have got worldwide rights, I would imagine So do you. If you're self publishing your books, there wouldn't really be a reason why you wouldn't so just just double check with this beacon. You can. If you know that you have got worldwide rights, just check all territories. This means that you'll be able to sell your book on every area in on Amazon in every country. If you want to limit that to specific territories than you can check this, okay, you can. If you click of this, it says view service here. This will give you an idea of what's other books like yours, how they're doing. So this is saying that at this price range to 99 I will likely sell the most books and make the most money for it, or I would likely maximize profits. So the higher this is, the better. See how we jump up here? Pretty pretty drastically. That's because this is a 35% royalty plant and this is this 70% royalty plan? Not so. Let's just go back here. So that's just a way to help you to determine what price your book should be. So I'm selling my book for 2 99 See how this is his gut is 35% royalty plan and it's 70% royalty plan so there is a big difference between these. The only way that you can check this 70% royalty plan is if your book is priced between 2 99 and 9 $99 and that that's different for each country. All right, so that just means that you get 70% of the of the royalty and Amazon keeps 30%. If you do the 35% Rosie plan, you can set the price from 99 cents to $200. So when you see books that are 99 cents or a dollar 99 on Amazon, that just means that the author is only earning a 35% royalty. Now, you know, this is this is Amazon's way of discouraging people pricing their books 99 cents in a dollar 90 night. They would like you to price it between 2 99 and 9 99 So that's why they offer that 70% royalty. There are probably other reasons as well. All right, so And if you want to sell your book for cheaper, you're gonna have to choose a 35% royalty. Now, if you look over here, it tells you that there's a delivery charge. So when you choose the 35% option you do not have there is no food delivery charge. There is only one when you choose the 70% option. Now, this delivery charge is based on your file size. So this is a 0.56 megabyte file. I believe the price is 15 cents per megabyte, so just keep that in mind. If you've got a really large book file, you are going to get charged for the delivery of that file. That just means that when people buy the book, Amazon is delivering it to that person's Kindle E reader, and they charge for that. They don't charge. The reader is just coming out of the your royalty. So it is entirely possible that if you've got a huge file here, it's possible that even with a 70% royalty, you'll be making less than you would with 35% royalty so you can see what you're royalty here is, and then you can. You can change that accordingly, and then here Amazon will automatically convert the price into the different currencies. Now, as you'll notice, do you have a keen eye here. And if you have any understanding off currency and you know worldwide, you'll note that that pounds are worth more than USD. So why is this the same? Is this The reason why I put this is to 99 not the suggested price of $2.12 not just because I'm greedy. It's that read that customers in general have gotten accustomed to seeing prices that end in 99. So if if you're converting your book from whatever prices up here, you don't wanna have strange prices here because it's gonna it's gonna throw potential readers off in the other countries, you know they're there. They're accustomed to seeing prices that ended 99 cents, and it's also going to make them realize that that this was probably an afterthought. You know that you haven't really thought very much about pricing the book in that person's country, and so they're probably just thinking love. The offer put, the book is to $2.12 here. They probably didn't really. They probably weren't thinking that through. What else are they not thinking through? You know, So I just think it's just a good business practice to go through this whenever Amazon converts the price and just the end. These 99 cents. However you know in India the bends in Japan and some other countries, the price is a little bit different. So you know you can you can can you use ah conversion as well just to see what the price would be. What a good price to set for this. And I don't think I've ever sold a book in Japan's that. I guess it doesn't really matter anyways, but also noticed that in certain countries you need to be enrolled in KDP Select in order to be eligible for a 70% royalty in that store for me again, I've never sold the book in Japan. I think maybe I sold one book in Brazil. I sell a lot in Canada, so that's good that I'm getting this 70% royalty there. But I've never sold one in Mexico, so there's really no pressing reason for me to have a 70% royalty there. I could have ah, 100% roti. It's not gonna matter if you're not selling books in those those stores who really cares this when I put us 3 99 just because that was the minimum price here, you know? And I figure you're Canadian Currency is is weaker than us. D and pounds are there are stronger currency than us. D. So just figure, you know, if your if things will just sort of even out in the ends. You know, Canadians sort of get a little bit of a deal, and people in Great Britain are getting a little bit less of a deal. But you know, whatever. That's life, right? All right. So you could also enroll your book and kindle Matchbook. This is optional. You can give customers who purchase your print book from Amazon the option to purchase your Kindle book for 2 99 or less, or you can give it away for free. I just give it to them for free. I figure if they're buying the print book, it's just a nice thing to do to give them a free copy that they can put on their E reader. If they, like, figure if they're buying the book, they should have it in. You know that there, by a print book at least they should have it in both formats. EBook lending. I allow lending this. This allows people to lend the book to family or friends for a duration of 14 days. All right, then it says it could take up to 72 hours for a title to be available for purchase on Amazon. So once, once you have filled all of your information out. Once you get your E book details your categories, your content is uploaded. You've worked on pricing hit Publish your Kindle e book, and then once everything is is approved, it gall goes through. Your book will show up like this on Amazon, you know? And so I think that's a pretty exciting thing for a lot of people. Tiu c Their book up for sale on a store. Maybe they've used 100 times their own life, you know? So I was excited the first time I saw my book up there. Now the fun doesn't stop here. There's a ton more information we can do on Amazon, such as see, here it says KDP Select enrollments. I've got a whole section on what KDP Select is because it is extremely important, and I didn't want to overwhelm You guys were just so much information this lecture, because this could really be like an hour and 1/2 lecture talking about Amazon Author central and book reporting AMs ads and all of that. So the Amazon is just such a huge topic that I wanted Teoh to sort of break it up here will also be discussing reports and how to check to see if your books are of selling or not. All right, One other thing that I did not discover yet is when you click on your accounts up here. And I'm not gonna show you how to do this because it's got all of my tax and banking information and all of that us in my my account numbers and all that. So just click on this up here. Whatever your account is, you are going to have to fill out a tax interview. So you're gonna have to tow add your your tax information. You're gonna have to add a bank account where they can transfer Europe your money and you're gonna have to add your personal information. It's tips. Set the price in each country to something more appropriate for example. Change $2. 84 cents to 2 99 This is something that I've heard people in other countries complaining about, and as I said before, it makes them feel like this is just an afterthought, all right, and make sure to play around with pricing to see what works best for your book. You may be surprised to find out that by setting the book for a lower price, you might not sell more copies at that lower price. Sometimes customers see those 99 cent books, and they think they're oven inferior quality. So they might. They might be more willing to buy the book ATS to 99 or 3 99 you know, so play around with pricing and just to see what's gonna work best for each of your individual books, you might find one book sells better at 3 99 and other spells sells better at 4 99 All right. And keep in mind, too, that the price range for most E books today by self published authors. It's generally between 99 cents and $4 in 99 cents. Also, consider reducing the file size of your E book to make more money. Remember, if you you're using that 70% royalty option, you are going to have to pay 15 cents per megabyte for the transfer for the delivery fee for for Amazon to deliver that file to the customer. So make sure to keep this in mind when you're formatting. Your book and some good tips to keep the size down for your book are to get rid of any photographs or illustrations or anything like that that you don't need for your book, because those are going to add a lot mawr size to your book than text will. All right up next, we're gonna discuss how to set up your books, categories and keywords on Amazon. Now, the reason why I didn't go over this in this particular lecture is because this is such an important topic. I wanted to give it a an entire lecture of its own, so please make sure you check this one out. Do not make the mistake of a lot of beginning authors make and just avoiding the keywords and categories these convey make a humongous difference between whether or not you're selling one book or 100 books a day on Amazon. So stick around and I hope to see you next time. Thanks 18. How to Determine your Book's Amazon Categories/Keywords (extremely important): All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be discussing how to set up your books, categories and keywords on Amazon. This is an extremely important topic, which is why I gave it its own separate lecture. So please make sure to follow. Follow along with this. This congee that's setting up the correct categories and keywords can mean the difference between selling no books or selling hundreds of books. So So just make sure that you're you are following along and you're setting up this information for your book. Okay, so I'll just go through this slide here, and then we're just gonna dive right into it. So I'm gonna give you a lot of information, but I'm gonna show you step by step. What it is exactly that I'm talking about here. So how do I choose categories in KDP, you can choose categories for your book. Now, these air extraordinarily important because the Kindle store has gotten millions of books on it. So you want to make your books as easily searchable and easily findable for potential readers as possible. And you're gonna do that through categories and keywords. All right, so Amazon used to allow self published authors to choose their own categories. Now, well, you can still choose categories, but it used to allow you to choose the most specific categories as possible. Now, the idea here with the categories is that you want to find a category that does not have a lot of competition, that they're not a lot of books in but that people are searching for because that way your book can show up higher in the rankings. And if people are buying books in that genre or that category, if you show up high in the rankings, people are likely then going to buy your book. So it's kind of the idea with this and again, I'm gonna show you what this looks like on the Kindle store here. You to use your bisect codes for your categories, says that information will come into play. You can check categories on the Kindle store, so show you how to do that and then choose seven key words that will help categorize your book. These air words. That's if people type in a search on Amazon that will help your book to show up. Amazon is basically like Google in that it is a search engine, all right, so it doesn't behave like a store. It is a search engine, and it's a search engine where the information is tailored. Torch eats each specific user, so Amazon is it's collecting data every single time. You use it every time you check something out. If you check out a book, if you check out whatever you know hair care products or if you're checking out new blankets or if you want to get a new Potter pan for your kitchen. Amazon is is recording all of this information. They know tons of information about their users, and they try to tailor their They're the information on their sites, products on their site. They tried toe, customize it for each individual user. And so it's important that we are creating keywords and categories that are going to attract users and so on. This and you can do that through through what we're going to discuss today, the categories and keywords. And you could also use a service like KDP rocket to help you to figure out keywords and categories in all of that. So I'll show you how to do that. You don't need KDP rocket to do that. Katie P rocket is a service you do have to pay for. Right now. It's $97 to buy, but you could do all of it for free. Okay, So when you're setting up your book on Kindle Direct Publishing, which I already explained to you in the previous lecture how to do come down to the keywords and categories section. This is where we're gonna be working with primarily today. Okay, so this is this is just like that the bisect categories that we set up. You can choose two of these, and the idea is that you want to be a specific as possible. Now, I do have some information here. Some suggestions from Amazon. So this is just the help section of KDP, and I've gone down to selecting browse categories, so I'm just gonna go over this with you. So this way you have more information about this before we really dive in. So it's saying during title set up, you'll selected Bisek. Uh, code. This the code you choose along with your selected key words are used. A place your book into certain categories or browse paths on Amazon. After your book has an Amazon listing, your books category will appear under the product details section of your listing. This will be the path a customer could follow to find your book for more information on timelines, including details of publications, you know, see the help page. So I'll show you what this looks like to on my books page. And as you see, since the last time I've been on here, we've got a few new reviews, so that's looking pretty good. All right, so this this is what we're talking about down here. These are the categories for your book. All right. So we could see the rankings. So the book jumped up a little bit since the last time s it was in the top 100 here in this this category. But see how this is very specific. So this book here it's in this metaphysical category, but it's also in the genre fiction category, also in literary literature infection also in the Kindle e books in the Kindle store. So if your book is in this category here, if it's in a specific category, it is also in the categories that air that come before. That's okay. So coming of age, it's also a genre fiction, literary and fiction kindle e book and kindle store. So I'm gonna explain a little bit about that. Here in this browse category tab ends. I am also going to explain why it's important to get into specific categories here. All right, so you let the choose up to to buy set codes for your book, and they may also a sign additional browse categories, depending on your Bisek selections and assign keywords. So you're going to see that you can't get very specific with your brows categories like this here fiction. I mean, you can get into see visionary and metaphysical. So it goes from fiction, the visionary metaphysical. But this So it put it, added it into this metaphysical and metaphysical and visionary category because I added keywords that refined my categories. So, yeah, I'm gonna show you how to do all this stuff here. Okay, So let's let's dive into some of the the advice here to Amazon gives How should I choose categories, So you want to be accurate. So the most accurate categories based on the subject matter for your book, avoid choosing one category that's explicitly fiction and another that's explicitly nonfiction. For example, if your book is a romance novel set during the US Civil War, choose fiction, romance, historical do not include history. US Civil War. All right, so and then instead, you can just use us. Civil War is a key word, because that will help to get your book into that category. Be specific, as I previously mentioned, choose specific categories instead of general ones. Customers looking for specific topics. We'll find your book more easily, and they also display your book in the general categories as well. So any of those categories that came before metaphysical in my book that's my book will show up in those categories as well, says here. Don't be redundant. Choosing a single category will display your book in a variety of searches, so don't list your book in a category and its sub categories. For example, don't select fiction, fantasy, historical and fiction fantasy, because if your book is in his fiction fantasy historical, it's also in fiction fantasy. So so one specific, accurate category is more effective than a redundant 2nd 1 and then to find examples. Finding which categories to the best fit for your book. Search for categories on Amazon. So and I'll show you how to do that. And we can also use KDP Rocket to make that extremely easy. Okay, so how do I add categories? The way to do that is they go back here so we've clicked on the categories. I'll show you what that looks like again here, So just click set categories and are by sack categories. Show up now Say, What's that? We've got fiction. We want to do African American fiction and we're writing a book. Are you reading a book on contemporary women in African American fiction? So your book is gonna show up in this category. It's also going to show up in these two categories. So where you're able to get specific, do that. Notice how we could do fiction, General, I mean, that is is just as it says is a very general category. The problem with being in a general category is that there may be 77,000 other books in that category, and nobody's going to see your book unless it is a best selling book Unless you're You're number one or two and you're competing with JK Rowling and Stephen King and and other rock star authors. Nobody's gonna see your book. It's gonna get lost in this general category, so try to be specific is possible and again we can make. We can even make this more specific by adding keywords to help to get into more specific category. All right, so let's go back here. There are some restricted categories, but your book likely will not get into those. You can't enable them. Amazon will have to put those in. Okay, so I keep saying stuff about keywords. So if you want a list of broken certain sub categories on amazon dot com and amazon dot com dot co dot UK, you'll need to add search keywords to the categories you choose. Choose a marketplace and click the categories to see your keyword requirements. So I'm here in the U. S. So see all these difference categories. So I'm just gonna check this one literature and fiction because that's the topic. The genre that I write in All right, so it says here literature and fiction keywords in order for a title to appear in the literature and fiction sub categories below the title search keywords must include at least one of the key words or phrases phrases listed next. This subcategory so right here. These categories and sub categories are specific to books listed for sale on amazon dot com . Other marketplaces may not sub support these keywords. This is just for Amazon. If you're also putting your book on kobo or iBooks. Thes keywords aren't necessarily going to do anything to help categorise your book. This just works on on Amazon. All right, so you notice that my book was in a coming of age category, so that just means I used coming of age as a keyword. So when I came over to keywords, I just typed in coming of age. And then this put it in. That's coming of age category here. All right, Okay, so it's say you're writing historical fiction in the 17th century. Just add 17th century to your keywords. I also writes books that have themes of alcohol and drug abuse and mental illness, so I would put all of that information in my keywords. These air also, but the key words do is that they don't just refine your categories. These are words that people are typing into Amazon to find books. As I said previously, Amazon is a search engine, so you can type something in here coming of age and see if it's going to show you, just like in Google, when you're typing in words, it's gonna give you suggestions. These are words that when people type type this stuff into into Amazon, your book could potentially pop up. Now, if we go to coming of age, see there over 70,000 results for coming of age. So unless your book is selling, hundreds were thousands of copies each day. You're not going to show up at the top of this list. So unless you're outselling Margaret Mead or whoever else you know, your book is not gonna show up in this this front page first page. Okay, All right, so this this is just some information and how you can choose your categories and your keywords. Extraordinarily important stuff. There are authors who whose books have gotten stagnant on Amazon like they've just stopped selling books and they've changed their keywords, and all of a sudden there books start selling. You know this. Just just change your keyword. There's no guarantee that's going to happen. But I do know of authors who, when they've refines their keywords, they have started to sell more books automatically. Amazon wants you to sell books because Amazon gets money when they sell your books. Amazon wants to. Amazon wants to find the best ways of selling your books to readers. They want to find who your readers are, and if you make it easy for them if you if you set up the correct categories, if you can. If you could find readers who maybe they love 17th century historical romance books if you can. If you can refined that as much as possible in people who who's search history and shows Amazon that these people love romance in 17th century historical books, Amazon is going to start working in overdrive to get that book seen by people who like those books. Amazon wants you to sell books. Amazon has gotten extraordinarily sophisticated search engine. All right, so this is why I'm gonna keep keep saying this. That's this is this is huge. This is absolutely huge stuff. Don't overlook key words a lot of authors, you know, they're studying up their book and they're like keywords, Whatever. I don't really care about this categories, all right? You know, it's this That's not really important. Let's just skip over all that stuff. I just want to get it up for sale. Don't do that. That's really foolish, All right, so we've looked at categories and little bits, more depth. I want to look at keywords here, too. So this is the key words section. So previously we looked at the browse category section. Now let's look at the make your book more discoverable with keywords section. All right. To make your book easier to find on Amazon, you need key words that accurately portray your books content and reflect the words customers will use when they search. Along with factors like sales history, an Amazon bestseller rank. Relevant keywords can boost your placement in search results on amazon dot com eso I showed you how to add keywords so we don't need toe to do that. It's his best Practice here is to combine keywords in the most logical order. Customers search for military science fiction, but probably not fiction. Science, military use up to seven key words or short phrases. Keep an eye on the character limit in the text field before publishing. Search for the book's title and keywords on Amazon. If you get irrelevant or unsatisfying results, make some changes when searching. Look at the suggestions that appear in the search field dropped down, and that's what I did when I look for coming of age here, right? You know, you take this in, it gives you results that pop up. So maybe you write coming of age fantasy fiction. So if you type in coming of age, just just type coming of age and see what pops up here. Now keep in mind these results are tailored towards what you have searched for in the past . So this isn't necessarily necessarily what all viewers on Amazon are going to see. This is just what you specifically are going to see because of what you have searched for in the past. I don't know why fantasy fiction would come up for me. I've never I looked at it before in my life or red fantasy fiction before my life. But let's just click on that so say you write in this genre, you can see what your competition is going to be in that category, and what you can also do is, let's see, you know, just click on one of these books and you can see what their sales ranking is. Now that is right here. This is an incredibly low sales ranking. This person is probably selling hundreds to thousands of books a day. All right, so this is pretty hefty competition. And unless you have got a huge marketing campaign, or maybe Barack Obama was just caught reading your book on the beach and they took a picture of him reading your book, you're probably not going to be able to compete with somebody like this, at least yet. You know, you're you're working on your your career here. As an author, you're building up your readership in all that. Maybe one of these days you'll be able to outsell that author. But this is how you can get an idea of whether or not your book is going to show up in this in this search or not, I mean, it will show up, but how high it will show up. See how there's 400 pages here. You don't want your book on page 400 because nobody's gonna see it. I deal you. Ideally, you want to show up on page one and see how this is sponsored. This is another way to get your book on there. This is an AMS ed. We're gonna talk about that in future lectures. All right, but you want to get it on, like page one or two. You don't want to get your book on page 99. Okay? So useful keyword types, if you're setting, is in Colonial America at that character types. Single dad, veteran character roles, strong female lead plot themes coming of age, forgiveness, story tone, dystopian. Feel good here. This is really important because you can get your book banned from Amazon by using keywords like this. So information covered elsewhere in your books meta title They're a meta data like the title or contributors don't say stuff like best novel ever. Don't put words in, like, new or on sale or available. Now, anything it's time sensitive is is is not prohibited information coming to most items in the category. We know it's a book. Try not to have spelling errors, variants of spacing, punctuation, capitalization and plural ization. So if you got 80 gigabytes and 80 gigabytes computer and computers, etcetera. The exception of that would be words translated at more than one way. Example. Mousey dung and mousey dung, Hanukkah and Hanako. Anything misrepresentative like the name of an author not associated with your book. Do not puts James Patterson as a keyword that that is, Ah, very quick way to get your book banned from Amazon. Don't do that. They're serious about that. I know. You may think, Well, there's millions of books on Amazon. How are they going to catch my my error there? They absolutely will. They'll catch it quickly. They have got bots that scour Amazon for information like this. They'll find it and they will. They will give you a nasty email, and they will tell you you need to change that keyword. Or they might just freeze your book or they might ban it from Amazon. Just don't mess around with this. All right? This this is you don't want toe. You don't want toe irritates Amazon, uh, quotation marks in search items. Single words work better than phrases and specific words work better than general ones. So if you enter, Complex is sense suspenseful. Who done it in quotation marks here, only people who type all those words will find your book. So if they'd have to put him in that order in order for your book to pop up. So for better results, just enter complex, suspenseful have done it without quotation marks. Customers can search for any of those words and find your book. Don't add information like Kindle Unlimited or KDP Select. Okay, and it gives some other metadata tips they might skim past long titles. Focus your books description on your books. Content there is some. There's some belief that that's words that are actually in your description. Your books description on Amazon will help readers to come to your book. Say, for example, you've got coming of age in your books description or dark and suspenseful in your books description. Meaning this information here. So if you've got keywords in there, you know, the people will that might potentially search for that's good, like psychological, deeply disturbing psychological coming of age novel. So this is this is information that people are typing in disturbing or or psychological, my book might pop up there. Also the title. If your title has got keywords in it, then that is that is a good way for it to shop higher in the rankings in any of those categories. So if you know a lot of for a lot of romance writers, let's see here so you'll see this a lot with with romance books. So see how this title says military romance, Navy Seals sons that I would imagine that Jessica Loft used this title because she knows that a lot of people are typing military romance into this search engine here. And because her title is military romance, it's going to show up very high on these results. So people use that in their their subtitles. A lot SciFi alien invasion romance, you know. So this is this is just something also that keep in mind, Amazon is not gonna allow you to just stuff a whole bunch of keywords into your title. And if the key words don't make any sense to be put into your title, don't do it, you know, it would be really stupid for me to put the summer of crowd Colon a hidden psychological coming of age novel. You know that Amazon is probably not going to allow that, and it's also just gonna irritate readers. So just do that if, for whatever reason, that it's relevant in your books case. Okay, okay, so we've discussed that's you could change key words and descriptions as often as you like . So this if you find out that keywords are not working for your book, so we gotta go here. So if you find out that these keywords aren't working for your book, just change it. And if your book is available in different formats, for example, physical audio, keep your keywords and description consistent across formats and also make sure your books and metadata here's to KDP's e book and paperback guidelines. So you want to check those out. And all this information is right here in the help topics in KDP. So if you do have any questions about this stuff, look it up here also, if you have any questions, you can you can contact Amazon as well, so just go down to contact us, and they'll answer you. Believe it or not, his biggest Amazon is they will get back to you with answers to your questions so that quality ranges. Sometimes people could be very helpful. Sometimes they're not very helpful. And so you might need to just try again if the person who is not helpful isn't helping you out. Okay, All right, that's that's a lot of information for keywords. A lot of information for categories. All right, so a good strategy to find out what categories you may want to use for your books. Just go to the Kindle store here. It's just scroll down to Kindle store than hit the the A magnifying glass there and then scroll down here. See how this this says Kindle E Books. These are all the different categories that books are in in Amazon's Kindle store. Now this, by the way to Amazon, has got to stores for books. They've got Kindle books and they've got paperback books. Okay, so if we go back to my book Summer of Crowd, see how we've got the Kindle store and the paperback store, so they've got to Different stores here on Amazon were in the Kindle store right now, and these are the categories for the Kindle store. The categories for paperback store. They're similar, but that they can be a little bit different. See how this is medical E books? That is not a category in the print store. That's to say you're writing literature. Uh, this They were writing coming of age books. So it's going a literature infection. So this is a broad category, and it's going to get more and more specific. So we're doing, let's say, literary fiction that that's a that's a genre I writing and then go down to. I see Well, it doesn't say coming of age. Let's just let's just use psychological that that's That's a category that I've I've done before. Okay, so and see how we've got themes down here so you can check this theme so we can refine this even further. So these air books that are psychological coming of age books now, and I already explained how to get your book into these categories. But now, just to see if this would be a good category for your books. Look at some of the top selling titles in this because we want to get our book on the first page here, right? So let's let's check out this 1st 1 Let's just scroll down and we see that this person is ranks 1556 in the paid Kindle store. Now I know I mentioned this a few other times before without really explaining it. This is just the ranking for that book. This and it does gets updated. I believe it's per hour. So this is This is always changing. Okay, changes from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. So this just means that this person is selling Mawr. There are 1555 authors selling higher in the Kindle store. This is the overall sellers rank. This is what the rank is in these specific categories. So, you know, you might think, Well, there's 1556 people selling Mawr. That that's that's not very good. Consider the fact there are literally millions of books being sold at Amazon. This is a really good ranking. Okay, so said this one might be hard to compete with this author, so let's go down to the the lowest one here. Their eyes were watching God and then we'll check and see how This is 10,388. So if you can sell more books than that, your book will show up in this this ranking and we're seeing that there are 1000. You know, they're this. They're 1555 off. They're selling more than the number one selling book in this category, but still from 1556 to whatever this was like 10,000. There are quite a few people that are looking up books in this category. So if you can get your book into this category, chances are people who are searching for these books are going to find your book, and they may buy your book. Now you for them to find your book is one thing for for them to buy it is another, and that really all depends on your books description your books cover. That's why the purpose of this course it's not just create a best selling book to create a high quality and beautiful book. If you creating a high quality and beautiful book, readers are going to get to your Amazon page and they're going to want to buy your story. Okay, So now if you want a service to do this for you, you can buy KDP Rocket And what KDP Rocket does, It scours Amazon, and it scours his best selling rankings, and it gives you reports that will help you to save a lot of time and effort. Now, I ran a category hunter report four coming of age stories. So I just typed coming of age in here, and then go get him, Rocket. And this is what came up. So this is going to show you the Amazon bestseller ranking off the number one book of that category. So the one that we just looked at was 1556. This one is 281. This one is 13. This one down here is to this means that this book is selling. There's only one book on Amazon that's selling better than this book. So this is a huge category. This tells you that the number of sales for that book today, So this has got 5780 sales. You Unless you're a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, you are very unlikely to get a higher number than that. All right, this this is huge here. So you're you're unlikely to sell more books in this person. However, this one Okay, this is a little bit more competitive. It's more competitive, but, you know, maybe that just means that people aren't really coming to it. So we want to find one where? All right, So it says here that the number of the 20th ranking book So when we look at their eyes were watching God, we saw that that book was ranked 10,000. So we want to find a book. That's kind of we want to find a category where we've got high rankings here and lower rankings here. So your book gets on that first page of that category, and a lot of people will be able to get to see it. So this says the number of sales for that 20th book. All right, so if we look at this one, this might be a good category. If your book is, you know, if if it fits this category of world literature Asian coming of age books, you won't want to get your book into this category because this is ranked fairly high and selling 364 books per day. But the 20th ranked book is only selling to. So if you could even sell more than two books per day, you're gonna show up on the number one page for this category, and it seems a lot of people are going to it. Okay, so that's how you would use this four categories. Now you can also use it for, says, new idea search that's type in coming of age. This is gonna help us with our keywords. Okay, so if you want to try different keywords, you can. So again, let's let's say we're looking for we're reading in the coming of age category, so it's gonna give you a whole bunch of different coming of age key words here. The way to analyze, to see whether these air good keywords for you to use or not is to say that says coming of age fiction just hit this analyze button. So it says here the competition score using known factors. An Amazon book ranking. This number tells you how hard it would be to rank your book for that keyword in Amazon with 99 being the hardest and one being the easiest. So we want to get a lower score here. The video for this says that if you if it's under 35 that's that's pretty. That's pretty reasonable that that's a good chance that your books gonna show up high for that keyword and showing that the Number one book the top book for this this keyword is earning $8371 per month. There are this many competitors. People on Google have searched this this word 110 times this month, and they're searching fewer than 100 times on Amazon. So this is just the way that you could find out what's what good keywords might be. So this one here see how this there are 22,870 competitors for this keyword. The top books is pop. Top book is making $13,631 per month. There are there's no data here for the Google searches, but this is huge. This means that 6439 people in a month I have typed that keyword into Amazon. So again This is just another tool that you can use to help you to determine your keywords . I recently changed to this one because I was using coming of age. And if you look at this, this is one hundreds. The competition here is 100. The competition here is 55. I figured I'd give it a try, you know, So I just just try this stuff out, see what might work for you. Alright, in some tips here for you use KDP rocket to find keywords. Now I did show you how you can do this for free without buying a service like ADP rocket, however it's it's going to take you much more time. So if you are going to be publishing a number of books more than just one, it may be wise for you to buy this service because it will help you to set up your categories, and it will help you to find keywords for Amazon. Also, make sure to change your keywords and categories every so often just toe to test to see if doing this will help you to increase sales. Also, contact Amazon to have your book placed in specific categories So I have heard from authors recently that by contacting Amazon on through there there, Amazon author, Central account or through KDP, they have been able to give Amazon specific categories that they'd like their e books and their print books to be in, and Amazon has updated that information. So if you if you know there's a specific category that you want your book in, then contact Amazon to see if they will put your book in that category. All right, up next, we're gonna discuss KDP Select, which is a program that Amazon offers to authors. You would have to enroll in this program, and this is something that many authors are using that has helped them to make tons of money. And so this is something you do not have to participate in. However, it may be extremely beneficial for you to do so. And I'm gonna explain what this is, how to enroll in it as well as the benefits and the some of the disadvantages of that in this next lecture. So you're gonna want to check this one out, so I hope 19. What is KDP Select and Why Enrolling in it Might Lead to Many More Sales?: All right, Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller I'm John Le Poma. And today we're going to be discussing KDP Select. So what is KDP? Select KDP Select is a program where you sell your book exclusively on Amazon for 90 days and you get a series of benefits for that now. What exclusivity means is that you cannot sell your e book on any other stores like iBooks or kobo or wherever, and you can only sell it on Amazon. You can, however, sell your print book wherever you would like. This is just for e books now for five days. During those 90 days, you can give your book away for free or sell it for 99 cents and earnest 70% royalty. So you may think, Well, why is giving the book away for free A benefits? So there are. This could be a controversial topic. Some authors think that's giving away your book for free. It could be detrimental, and it's possible, you know, depending on your situation. Is it off there? It may be potentially detrimental for you. However. A lot of authors use this as a strategy to get new readers interested in their books and especially if you're writing in a Siri's let's say you've got 78 20 books in a Siri's if you give away the 1st 1 for free. If readers like it, chances are they'll buy the next book in your Siri's, the next books in Your Siri's. Or They may just by your other books. If you're not even writing in a series, you know. So there can be advantages to this, and I have. I have enrolled my book Developing Minds in American Ghost Story in KDP Select a couple of years ago and I didn't give away, and I believe I gave away over five or 6000 copies of the book, and there could be benefits to that as well, and that you get reviews more people I know about the book. I'm still getting reviews trickling in, even from that time, I would imagine, because people will download a book and then a year two years later, they finally get around to reading it. You know, my to be read pile is is pretty huge here in my apartment, so but it was it was beneficial. Now just keep in mind if you're getting reviews from giving your book away for free, it is possible that you're going to get a Siris of bad reviews in that you will get people who download your horror book and say, I hate horror stories. They'll download your your ghost story and they'll say, Why did I have to be so many ghosts in this book? They'll download your romance story and they will say, Why does there have to be so much romance in this book? You know it. You'll find that that you cannot please people, even if you're giving them a book away for free, you know, So just just keep that in mind. If you are doing a giveaway, what? We'll talk a little bit more about giveaways later on. You can also earn a 70% royalty in India, Mexico, Japan and Brazil. Aziz, you notice in the previous like lesson that you only earn a 35% royalty in those stores unless you are enrolled in KDP Select. And also probably the biggest benefit of this is that your book is enrolled in the Kindle on Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle owners lending Library. Now these air to programs that I'll explain a little bit more than the upcoming slides. But basically, readers on Amazon can read your book well, they can't read it for free. They have to pay for a subscription, But they can read your book and you get paid based on the number of pages that they read. They don't pay for the book. They're actually buying your book. They're just downloading your book. And and based on the number of pages they read, you get paid for that from the KDP Select Global Fund. So again you're paid per page, and the amount paid per page recently has been ranging from anywhere from this, you know, 0.42 points. 045 cents. So, as you see, it's not very much per page. It's about, you know, think about like roughly under half a sense per page so you can use that to convert for your book. And this may be less money than the amount you would make from people actually purchasing your book. But the benefit of Begin these programs is that readers may not want this toe pay the full price for your book if they're enrolled in a service like this. They may just pick it up because they they are able to download your book without paying the full price for it so you can get new readers this way. So Kindle Unlimited. This Is this a service where Pete readers pay 9 99 a month to subscribe, and they can read unlimited books per month and you get paid by the number of pages they read and the Kindle owners lending library. This is a service for Amazon prime subscribers, where they can choose one book per month and read that book, and you get paid on the number of pages that they read. All right, so I'm gonna show you how to actually set this up. Here. It's It's fairly simple. So if we go back to your KDP accounts when you log, you know, clicking on your book, get to this section here for the Kindle e book pricing. And then just click this view the promotions page to manager KDP Select Enrollments that's gonna bring you to this tab. So let's say I wanted to promote my book this summer of Crunch on KDP Select to enroll. It's you would just click this button. And the thing is, you absolutely need to make sure your book is off off any other online stores because Amazon will know they do have information, you know, they they absolutely will know if you are selling your book on other stores and they will send you a warning email saying, You know, if your book does not come off of my books soon, we're going to be kick it, kick you out of KGB Select. They might even, you know, kick you off of Amazon. I mean, it's possible. I've heard horror stories just you don't want to mess around with Amazon. All right, there they're way too big and way too powerful. Just just abide by their terms. And so what you can do here is you could run the price promotions, as I had previously mentioned, so you can check either a Kindle countdown deal. That's the one where you can get you gun. So your book for 99 cents or a dollar? 99 for that 70% royalty, or you could just give it away for free. These air both five day promotions. You could run ads here, and I'm gonna show you how to do Amazon Marketing Services ads in a lesson in the future here. So there's a whole lesson on that, and Mr says you'll earn relatives from the KDP Select Global Fund. So if you want to enroll your book in this, just click there and it will do that. This, you know, you might want to just give it a try. It's, you know, they can't hurt. And at least in the U. S, Amazon is by far the largest bookseller. So if you you know if you're in the US and you, you want toe, uh, access that that market I mean, this Amazon by far and away is the biggest. So, being exclusive, the Amazon is not necessarily going to, you know, it's it can hurt sales, But you may sell far more books by enroll your book in KTB Select. Now that you can have, there are benefits to what? What's self publishing authors called going wide going? Why just means that you're not exclusive to Amazon? You're you're selling on a number of different stores and there are promotions on kobo and you know, I Books is also a very important store. So I it's important to sort of way the pros and counts of this decision. But a lot of the authors that I talk to that I see who are making tons of money they're doing it through Amazon, select her. I'm sorry, KDP Select. So it's something to strongly consider. And you may be one of these authors that uses this and is able to then quit your job and just to write full time. So it is that powerful of a service complaints I hear from people that that's the page per read number. It goes down. You know, sometimes it goes down pretty drastically, and so, you know that's gonna affect your bottom line. But I just wanted to let you know about this, and I didn't want to add this in with the previous lecture because I felt that that would just be way too much information for you. All right, so tips here, you know, just strongly consider whether or not KDP select is good for you. It may be it may not be. You can always try it. You know, I I think that I'm going to do it with my next book. with the current books this summer of Crowd and Understanding the Al Quran. I have got those on kobo. IBooks ends the didn't bookstore. So on burns and noble dot com. And really, the vast majority of my sales have come from Amazon. And so I think that what I'm gonna do for my next book is I'm going to enroll. It's in KDP Select, and just to see what happens. So it couldn't hurt. You know, if if if if I was seeing huge sales on Kobo or iBooks, I would strongly can reconsider that. But again, the majority of my sales air coming through Amazon one thing that I would I would be, you know I would consider is that Kobo is really making a charge now that they're really trying to to be more competitive with Amazon, and they're offering some pretty great services like they have got a promotions tab. Now where you can, you could run promotions on the kobo sites to potentially get more readers or to advertise sales to give you a book away for free. They also got a feature for overdrive, where libraries can purchase your books, your e books so we'll talk about that stuff in the other sections on Cobo and I books that are coming up here. But this is just something to consider. Okay, so that is it. The next topic we're gonna discuss is off their central and book report. So off their central, this is a thing that a lot of authors who published their books on Amazon overlook and it is extremely important. It's not that difficult to set up, and it can make a huge difference for your sales. And also, book report is a great tool that you can use to check out reports of your sales. All right, so we'll see you next time and hope you're having a great day. That's 20. How to Set up your Author Central and Book Report Accounts : right and welcome back to from first drafted bestseller I'm John La Poma. And today we're going to be discussing Authors Central and Book Report. All right, so Author Central this is a great feature for writers who have got their books for sale on Amazon. It's a great feature where they can compile all of their books together into an accounts, and they can give readers more information about themselves. I'll show you which what my author central account looks like just so you can get an idea. And so off there's that have gotten off their central accounts. They've got a little hyper link here where you can visit their page. So this is what my author central account looks like to readers. It shows all of my books. It's got a picture of me. It's got a bio. It lists my books down here, and it also shows which authors customers bought items by. So these are all authors. That's people. After having having purchased my books, they've purchased books from these people as well, and so this, you know, this might not seem like much, but let's say it off. There really are a reader, really likes one of your books that they can find out more information about you by clicking on that link and finding out more about your books. And you can add even more information here to this is Well, so this is something you could set up when your book is on Amazon. It allows you to control your author page. You can add a bio, picture all of your books, editorial reviews, a link to a blawg events, videos and much more. All right. And so some of that stuff, like, if I had videos, they would show up down here. If I had a block, it would show up here So I can add more information to this if I want to. And it also allows readers to follow you. There's a feature. See, I checked this. I'm following myself. This way I can see what updates people who are following me gets. If people follow you, they get updates. When you release new books, you you don't know you can't get the information about who is following you and even how many people are following you. These people just get updates when you published new books, okay. And You can also do this in Japan, France, the U. K. Germany, and more to come. So there are author central pages in all of those countries. Now, clearly, those pages are going to be in Japanese and French and German. But if you know the set up of what the page looks like in English, it's the same set up. So you don't really need to speak the language. As long as you know where to click. You could still navigate those sites. All right, so I'm gonna show you how to set up an office central page. So to do that, just go to www dot author central that amazon dot com This just says slash gp slash home because I've already logged into my account and then just sign in. This will bring you to this page here. Welcome to Author Central. And so here is my author Page. I have added my biography and you can you can edit this bite by Thai PM here This you use plain text only. So no rich formatting or html thing is sometimes this information does not look very pretty . So you can Well, it says not to add html. I have added, you know, like a line break here in case the information gets scrunched together. I'm not going to submit this, but sometimes this will be connected to that. So if you add like this code, it's just the less than sign and then br and the greater than sign that will add a line break between these two. I'm just gonna close that. And this is something I do updates pretty frequently so you can add a blawg. Here. You can add events. I have added events in the past when I've done book signings or I gave ah lecture to a writer's group here in San Diego one night, so I ended that information. Here is a customizable U R L that you can use to send two people to bring them to your your office Central page. You can share this on Facebook or Twitter wherever you can. Add photos. Here. You can add videos, interviews, book trailers, book signing events, you know. So our book signing videos this is there's a lot of great stuff you could do with this toe . Add your books, just click on the books tab and if you cannot see your book. Just click, add more books and then just search. So let's see. I'm just getting, you know, So your books were just just add your book's title search for your book and if, if you need to add, you can just check toe, add it to your accounts so you can you can search by title author I ESPN. But then just add all of your books to your accounts. Once you have your books on here, say, for example, a click this summer of Crowd here. We can go into that book, and we can add editorial reviews and more information about to see how we've got the two additions here. The Kindle and the paper bag. I'm looking at the Kindle edition right now, so I was able to add reviews by clicking this edit here, and I added some blurbs here, see how they get the bunched together. That's how you know, if you add your this is just a standard tickets HTML or whatever. I just know that if you add this this less than sign and then the BR and in the greater than sign, it'll create a break between these two. So if you go to preview at this Lisa McCombs one, see how there's this space, there's not a space here to get that space. Just add this this code there, so I'm not going to say this, but that's how you can get your reviews onto your page. And so when you go toe to the book here, Summer of Crowd, see how it's got these editorial reviews right here. So those air reviews that I added here in Author Central you could add more information as you like. You can update the product description here. This is something that I also put on the my KDP. So not Can't be. It's like my KDP accounts. When I set the book up, you can add information from the off there from the inside flat from the back flap about the author. I just added another bio here, and that information shows up down here. All right, so it'll add your picture at a little bio. I wouldn't get too crazy with this. I think maybe I added too much information on this. I've seen some people who just have, like, a sentence. Some people have to be this much information. I think if you add a ton of information, people might not read it all. So Okay, so that's how you get your information up on Amazon. You could do the same thing. Click paperback. You're gonna have to add all this information again. But what you can do is just copy and paste this onto onto the paperback version. You can also check sales info. You can check the Nielsen books can rankings to see how many paperback books have sold. You can check your sales ranks for your books. So this showed mine here. And it shows you when the rankings go up and down, you'll show you you're off the brink. So I m Brinks. 110,557. Right now, out of all the millions of authors on Amazon, so you know that that might seem pretty high. But again, if we're considered there are millions of authors on there, that's that's actually in the higher higher rankings. I want to get this up to see. On February 24th I was 32,573 so it goes up and down if you look at all the available information. This is when I first started out. And this it's it's remained pretty consistent. The highest I've ever been was probably about think 2000 here, 2068. And once I got to that number here, it stayed up pretty consistently. Now, about publishing more books. This this is going to spike every time you publish a book. So this this spike here after I published understanding the Alec ran. So I published developing minds here or no, I'm sorry. Um, he here, right here. And so that information is for developing minds here. And then after that, I published understanding the eloquent ends. No, it didn't start to bump up until I published this summer of cruddy as well here. So the more books you're publishing, the better your ranking is going to be. And if you can get into the higher ranking Amazon, Amazon lists the ranking on on Amazon. Like, you know, top top authors. If you can get to a high enough ranking, people will see that and you'll sell more books that way. It also tells you what's kind of cool is it tells you the geographical region where you're getting sales. So it's telling me that's I've sold a lot of books in San Diego, two in L. A. Two in Oklahoma City sold one in Buffalo. There's a print copies, by the way, one in Plattsburgh. So you can you can check out to see where people are buying my books for your books. And also you get to see customer reviews here so you can see the different reviews. People are leaving as you notice. The reviews for me have been pretty good here that people for for the Summer of crowd and then some of these have been for understanding the Alec Ren. This was four developing minds, so we'll tell you when people are leaving those reviews. So this is just a great a great service that you can use to manage your books manager, author page and give readers a better experience. Give them about more information about you, so do not neglect this. This is something a lot of a lot of authors neglect. They just put their books up on Amazon. Like I said, they forget about the keywords they forget about categories they don't sit up there. Author central page. They you know, they're there just to just get the stuff. They're stuff up there as quickly as possible, and they're not. They're not optimizing their their Amazon page, and they're not They're not doing all this information. They're not They're not doing what All that they can to sell more books. So So get on there. Okay. And now let's get go to book report. So book report. This is a program that gives you detailed sales reports. Now you can get sales information on KDP Select. Sorry, I'm KDP on your dashboard. There's a reports tab. Okay. What? You click on reports you will gets reports here for your book sales. Now you can You can check out to see which stores you are selling your books on. So which Amazon stores? I've just got it set toe all marketplaces here, and I only have books by myself. If if you're a publisher and you've got a ton of different authors on here, you can select which authors to see reports for you can choose between e books and paperbacks. I have never actually seen a paperback sale on here, so I don't think it It does a great job of reporting those, and you can choose between which book you'd like to see and select the range, and it can go as far back. It's 90 days, all right, So these are all the books that I've sold on these days to get seven sales that day 4 to 2111. So the idea here is is to maximize that number each day. And then, as I told you previously, there's the K U and Kindle owners Kindle owners Lindell Lending Library. This will show you how many pages have been read. Now I'm not enrolled in KDP Select, so I don't have any pages read. But if I wasn't KDP select. This is where I could check out to see how many pages I got red over red. Now, if you want to have a more detailed reports for all of this, you can go. You can download what's called Book Report, so just go to www dot get book report dot com All one word and then click here. Get book report Now. The way to download this is to click and drag this button here up into your downloads bar and As you see, I have already done that. And then all you have to do is click on your KDP bookshelf and then click on your new on your new book market. Markle it. Sorry, and then it says, Watch the magic happen. So it's It's really simple and so see how it's it's up here. Book report. So all you want to do is it's come to you're KDP accounts. Make sure that you're on your bookshelf here, and then just click this book report and it will open up your book reports account aren't see how this this will give you this will give you data about your books. And I'll tell you how many how many books that you have earns or how much money that you've earned. And so you can check on this yesterday Last week this month last month, 30 days, 90 days. I chose a custom range from December 1st into February 27th. And so this is when I started to see the most sales was in this range. So I have made $139.9 in this range for these two books, and then you can scroll down here and you can see the number of sales you had each day. And so things kind of took a little dive here in February for a little while. But they were consistent for for a few months, and then they started to rise again when I published this summer of Crowd. And so this is just a great way of keeping track of your sales. You could see how much money you're earning each day, each month, each week, whatever you want it to. To our, however, you want to customize those reports, it tells you how many or how much you've earned per book says. You see, most of that money has come from understanding the L. A Quran, and only a little bit has come from summer of Crowd. But in that period, Summer of Credit only been published for a week, and it tells you which stores I'm earning the most money. And surprisingly, I'm making the most money in Amazon's UK store. So that is, and that that's that's great for me because I'm getting paid in pounds, so making even more money per sale. And so this shows that I have had 398 sales since December 1st. So that's it's about 400 sales in three months us that that breaks down to about 133 sales . If my math is correct per month. And as I mentioned previously, after a few months after I sold my first Bird published my first book, Developing Minds, the sales just dropped to zero, and they were at zero for probably they're probably at zero for probably about a year. And then those sales didn't start picking up until I started growing my mailing list. And as I told you, my publisher last year told me, had sold 128 copies of developing minds. Now that was just I'm assuming just from developing my mailing list, and I didn't do any other marketing for that. I didn't you know. It was just It was just there, and I was working on getting understanding. The Alec ran together, written and edited so I can get it ready for publication. And then I started writing this summer of crowds. So what I you know, once once I have started running ads as well, I started to see MAWR sales for my books. And so that's That's the information here I'm sharing with you. This stuff is it's working for me, and I'm writing in a genre with an almost non existence readership. So this I'm hoping for you that this, you know, you're going to see these big spikes. You'll have $100 days, you know, all the time. So that's that's my hope for you. $110,000 days for you. All right, so this is just another another great service you can use to get customized reports and just a track, all of your sales and and all of that information. OK, so and it's free to use. This is a free thing for you. You do need to be looked into your KDP dashboard if you're if you're anywhere else on this site here. If you're on KTB selected community and you click on this, it's not gonna work, so make sure you're on the bookshelf. Then just click the link you dragged into your bookmarks. Bar tips. Spend time making, engaging author page really put some effort into this. If you have got videos or or blog's at that stuff. You know, this is this gives you the opportunity to connect more with your readers. And so I think you should take that opportunity. I don't have videos right now to add to that, but I would consider maybe adding, like an interview, an author interview, or maybe something from a book signing events, you know, so customize this, however you would like to do that, but just make sure to spend some time doing that. Okay, so that's it for Amazon. As you see, that was a ton of information we're even gonna ADM. Or when I talk about AMS or Amazon Marketing Services adds. So as I showed you, that data from from my book report accounts the sales for my books. They have gone from zero for months to, you know, I'm making anywhere from 1 to 5 sales per day, and it's been pretty consistent over the last three months. I'm gonna show you how to do that with with Amazon Marketing Services adds. That's so we'll get to that a few you know, down the line here. But next we're gonna talk about setting up your books on iBooks and this I really wish I had somebody walking me through this because this it's not It's not very easy. And you do need a Mac for this. Just so you know, if you want to set your book up on iBooks and sell it there, you need, um back. All right, so let's let's let's dive into that next so hope to see you there. And if you don't want to sell your books that I books, just just skip ahead to kobo or, uh, board nook or whichever whichever other lecture you want to go to. If you're just interested in selling on Amazon, you can skip the other lectures here. All right, See you next time. And until then, have a great day. 21. How to Set up your Book to Sell on Apple's iBooks Store: right. And welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Lymphoma. And today we're going to be discussing how to set your books up for sale on my books. Okay, so as I've previously mentioned this, this could be kind of Ah, a little bit of a tricky process. And you do need a Mac to do this. So if you have a PC than you're not going to be able to set your book up on iBooks So just to let you know that right away, so you want to start by logging into iTunes connect. So again you need a Mac and you need a log in information. So you would need your your apple I d. And to create a password. And then we'll add the tax, banking and business information. So I'm gonna show you how to do this year. So I have logged in the iTunes connect. So this is my iTunes connect account. I tunes to get here. You just goto iTunes that I T. U N E s connect. That's all. One word dot apple dot com sets the Web address up here. So, as I said, we need to add the tax and banking information. So you're going to do that by checking their clicking on this box here agreements, tax and banking. And then you're going to add your information into these sections. Now, this is not a very it's not, as it is easy to navigate as Amazon, and so this this could be a little bit tricky, But just click each of these edits and add your information. So I'm not gonna click on these because I've got my bank in my text information. Here is my contact information as well. So But just again, this is how you would set your information up and then just click done when you're all done , so that that's step number one. And then what we want to do is download iTunes producer. So this is a separate program. It's not like Amazon, where you can just upload your file to a website here. You need to actually download this producer program, which is an app which you can download, writes your computer, and then you're gonna add your books up on that. So to do this, we're gonna go to resource is and help. Then click on download. ITunes producer and submit your book. Let's go to Resource Is and help are and then click books and then click. Download iTunes producer and submit your book. And if you have any questions about any of this stuff to, you can watch the video tutorials here. Once you've downloaded iTunes producer, What you can do then is open iTunes producer, which is this here? All right, so give me when I click on book and then you'll fill out all of your books information here , and then drag your cover file. Here's just go open your file and then click it and dragons and drop it right onto this and it will automatically just show up here and then you'll. You'll set your pricing information. Click the plus toe. Add your your territory and rights so you can choose to enable the digital rights managements feature. If you'd like to, and your book's publication date. Add your pre order date. If you'd like to the publication type, so this tells you a little bit more information about that. For additional details, see your contract in the contracts tax and banking module. So I set up my book as a new release and then choose your currency. Add the physical list price and the iBooks list price, and then here you're gonna choose your regions. If you select all, it'll check all of these. So again, if you if you're self publishing, you very likely have world rights to your books, and then you just hit save. All right, So once we have saved that, then you'll see this. So this this is where you can change the prices if you would like to, and you could make it any of these prices. And you can also make it free, which is a nice feature, which you're not able. Well, you can. You can get your book for free on Amazon by setting the price will by showing that it's cheaper and another store. But there is no feature for you to automatically just add it to toe free on Amazon. So what you would need to do is at it to make it free and a sterling iBooks and then match the price. And so I showed you how to do that in a previous lecture. So all right, so, see, these are all the stores that you could sell. It on on iBooks. You can change the price here. Then, once you've done that, drag your E pub file writes onto this, and then you would just hit, submit, and then there'll be another box that pops up. It'll it'll show you. That's the submission on all the information is loading, and then you can submit that again at the ends. And then what happens once you have got? Once you've added your book and iTunes producer, it's gonna show up under your my books section in iTunes Connect. So when you first like you can't just when you first set this up, you can't just add your books to iTunes Connect. You have to add them through iTunes producer and then they'll show up here. All right, so and then you can check your sales reports. You can check your financial information. If you have any questions you can go to. Resource is and help. If you need to update any this information, you can. I changed my banking information recently, so that's something you can do whenever you you would like to. And that's pretty much it for getting it on my books. So again you do on a download iTunes producer. Add your book in its metadata, and it's pricing information here. And then you can check your sales and trends in all that here. All right, and your payment information payments are made within 45 days of the last purchase of the month in which book purchases were made. To receive payment, you must have provided all required banking and tax information and documentation, as well as meeting the minimum payment threshold. You also heard 70% off whatever you sell at any of the price points. So unlike on Amazon, where you only get 35% of royalty for 99 cents sales here on my books, you can keep 70% of that. So that's that's another advantage to going wide. Is that, like on my books, you can get 70% of your royalties on sales for any price point, and also you can give your books away for free things to consider before enrolling your book in KDP Select right. Some tips. Just have your banking tax and metadata information handy. All right, so next we're going to set your book up on nook that is burns and nobles version of an E reader. So this one is a little bit easier that I books. So I hope you join me for this one next. 22. How to Set up your Book to Sell on Barnes & Noble's NOOK Store: all right. And welcome back to from first draft, the best seller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna talk about how to set your book up on nook, which is where you can sell your book on burns in noble dot com. Okay, so step one. You want to create an account on look press, so log in and then click create a new book to you and your e pub file cover metadata, pricing and all that information just like you've done in the previous websites. The previous vendors, like Amazon and I books. So let's go here. So here is Barnes and Noble press. So we've logged into press dot Barnes and noble dot com. So you just have to set up an account, and it will bring you to this page. So this is my account, obviously. Okay, So come down here to create a new book, and then which type of book you'd like to create? Just pick e book. You can create print books on new press. I I have heard some people who have done it who would not recommend it. You know, you're entirely the decision is entirely up to you. If you're gonna create a print book, I would highly recommend using Ingram Spark that. That's That's my number one. And if you don't want to use in Game Spark, I would then go with create space. Then just pick e book. Click next and your book's title hit Next sample and Your Interior file. So this is where you're going to drag and drop your E pub file. Okay, so this is you know, we've done this before, and then you'll be able to review the file after you've submitted it here, you can drag and drop your cover image. Your cover file. Here. You'll add your information about your book so you add the title publisher name, publication dates, addition number addition. Description is a part of a Siri's Yes or no. Here, you can add your description, the long book description. If you'd like, then you can save and continue. It will bring it to this author section. So here you can add yourself and ends a little bit about yourself. So here you can target your audience. So I would for my books. I would just go with general adults, so just check that and language I write in English, the primary category. This is where we can pick the categories for the books, and as you see, we get up to three categories. So I would go with fiction for me, and then you have got it some sub categories here. So I would go with literary fiction, and then you can choose other sub categories as well. And then, if you want to add another one, just click. Add another category, okay, just do the same thing. And here you can choose keywords as well. So just keep in mind the key words that you use that are effective on Amazon aren't necessarily going to be effective here on Kindle is well or on nook as well. So just keep in mind that these air two totally different stores and you might want to try different keywords on both stores to see which are the most effective on those stores. Okay, so let's let's leave the page there. So now we're gonna do pricing. Let's say we're setting the book for 4 99 As you see, you keep 65% and Barnes and Noble keeps 35%. So if you set the book for 4 99 you make $3.24 per e book sale. Not bad if you're getting 100 these sales each day. Right? Okay, so let's leave the page here again. So this would you like to select digital rights management encryption for this book? And again, you can't change this after you have already sold the book. I've always just checked. No, my books are mine. They're not in the public domain. If you have written your own book, then your book is not in the public domain. So you can check No for this. Do you have an e book specific? I ESPN I do. And solid. Add that here again as just to rehash some of that information for the I s bien lecture. You don't need an I s bien to sell e books on Barnes and Noble or Amazon or iBooks. But if you have one, it's good to add it here. And then you can add editorial reviews as well. And so I have done those so you can add the reviewers first name, last name and in the source, the thing is, sometimes you don't get the reviewers first or last name. So it's It's tricky for for what to do with this. That is Put Kirkus reviews best book of all time. Right. Let's see if that will allow us to save it. So Okay, so it did allow me to say that. So you don't need to put the review is first or last name. If you just have a source like Kirkus reviews, you can add that review, All right. And this pretty much it. Now, if you want to check your sales reports, you can check here. Do you want to check out which projects you have? You can click this. This one, This tab here, it'll show you which which books you have this one. I am going to delete this book because I just added that. And I don't want this on my accounts, okay? And we can we can go then to Let's go to Barnes and noble dot com. All right, so here on burns noble dot com, we could see all of my books. Let's just just click here this summer of crude. So as you see, you can sell your paperback books on nook on Barnes and noble dot com. The way that I have gotten my paperback book on to Barnes noble dot com is through Ingram Spark. And so that's how that's how the paperback versions of my books are sold in stores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. So I didn't add the book on Barnes and Noble. This is just through Ingraham Spark, so I'm gonna check nook book here. And as you see it's It's 3 99 on this store. And one nice thing about having published my books on the Nook store is that I made this Burns and Noble press presents list. So I got an email from Burns and Noble, and they let me know that that they'd selected my book for this list, which was a great honor for me. And so these air again perks of going wide not just being exclusive to Amazon, you can do things like set the book for free. You can, uh, you know, here. You could maybe have Barnes and Noble promote your book if they like it. So again, weigh your options, find out what's what's the best for you. All right, so here are my well, here's the overview off the book. Here's the description. Here are the editorial reviews. So as you see, I don't know why it duplicated some of these. The Kirkus Wanted duplicated. So, like here it duplicated these. Whatever. I I don't I don't get it. And then here are some of the reviews that readers have left. So, so far the reviews have been really good. I have noticed, at least on for my books that on burns and noble, I generally get really good reviews. I think that the people who are really harsh tend to stick to, like, good reads and sometimes Amazon. So okay, so that's pretty much it. Also, you'll have to create a vendor accounts. So the ad your vendor account just go to my accounts and then click on vendor account and then fill in all of the information that they ask. You'll have to add your tax and banking information are, and then you're gonna get paid when you have accrued and minimum of $10 in royalties. And it's been 60 days after the close of the calendar month in which the sales occurs. So, for example, your October payment will be for your August sales. That's coming right from the nook website. Okay, so for royalties, you earned 40% for sales between 99 cents and $2 in 98 cents, and you earn 65% for sales between 2 99 and 199 90 Diet. So this it's only better than Amazon at the 99 cents or 1 99 price point. So you make a little bit more on Amazon than you do on Barnes and noble dot com. All right, so tips have your banking tax and metadata information handy again. So it's gonna be the same thing for kobo as well, and play around with your keywords and pricing to see if those will help sales at all. So next we're gonna talk about how to set your book up on Kobo, and this one is probably the easiest off the before that I'm talking about here and it's got some pretty cool new benefits that's that weren't even available when I started trading this course. So I'm gonna tell you about those. All right, so So stick around. We'll see you next time 23. How to Set up your Book to Sell on Kobo: All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're going to discuss how to sell your books on Kobo. Alright. So first, create a writing life account. Now, writing life is basically like Cobos, KDP or nook. You know, it's it's it's the name of their platform where you can upload your books and and sell them on kobo. So you want to log in click e books, click create new e book, add the e book or the pub file cover metadata price just like you've done before. And then we'll publish that book. So I'm gonna show you how to do that. All right, so this is my dashboard here. So the log in go to writing life that kobo ebooks dot com and then just create an account. And then it will take you to this This page here. So this this shows you how many books have been sold this month. So I have not sold any books yet in March, and it's told me that I sold 36 books all time tells me how much money I've made tells me how Maney free books I've given away and it tells me which books have sold which numbers of copies. And it will also tell you which region that's books have been sold in. But I haven't sold any books in March, so it doesn't have that information here. Okay, So to set up your e book again, go to E books and then you see that I've got my to e books here. And so what you'll want to do is to create a new e book. But in order for me to go through the process, I need to actually fill out information. So in order to show you how to do this, I'm just going to show you how I did it for this book this summer of Crowd. So we've got the title. We've got my name, the publisher, the date of publication. The I s bien. This was for the English is the language. It is not in the public domain. Here is my synopsis, and I added this blurb from Kirkus reviews. Okay, so then we want to the next section where you'll be ableto upload your file so you can upload your e pub file and then here you can download and preview the book. And so this is something I recommend you doing again on nook and on Amazon. So download your book and just to see what it looks like on the specific reader E reader on that site, All right. And so this one, I checked it out it and look good. And so here you can apply for digital rights management. I didn't. I have worldwide rights, So I checked to that, and I did not. I did not add it to crumble kobo. Plus it's ah, program. It's kind of like KDP Select. However it is, it is different in that you do not have to be exclusive to kobo for a the period of that. But you do have to keep the book enrolled in Cobo for that period. And so there's If you want to learn more about it, you can just check this here. I have not enrolled it in that I would like to get more information about that before doing it. And now this is a really cool feature here. That's that they're rolling out. This is the overdrive feature, so you can add your e book toe over drives catalog to enable thousands of libraries around the world to publish it. And so they recommend, you said, a unique price that is about the same price as a trade paperback copy. And so I've chosen 7 99 and what this does is overdrive is, ah, a website, or it's a company where librarians can finds new books. They can purchase E books. They can purchase a license for that e book and say they purchase a licence for one of my copies. They would buy it for 7 99 and then they can lend that book Elektronik Lee, to any of the there their library members. Four life So they have that license they can lend. They can lend that copy out to as many people as as would like to download it. If they want to have more than one license, they would have to buy another copy of this. So this is a great way to get your book into libraries, and it might be good to do that. If you got family or friends in your area, just have them request the book from the library. So this way it gets the library into to potentially purchase it for for those people. So generates some interest in that the library and then might purchase that that book for the collection in the library. All right, the next you'll set the price. So just like with Amazon, if you set a price up here, it will. It will automatically give you it a lot of Medicaid converted. But what I did is I change these prices again to prices that worm or more reasonable, that looks better in these the kobo store. So, as you see, like, you know, this is not to 12 it's to 99 and you can schedule price changes. So this is kind of cool. Like if you have a sale coming up, you can schedule that price change. And then after this, just click publish your e book, and it'll it'll be on the kobo stores. And this is this is my Cobo page here from for my for me. So there's my books here. Let's just check out understanding the Alec ran because the only one that has reviews so far so I can show you what those look like. So this one is I'm running a promotion right now this is a free promotion. That's a limited time offer, and this shows the synopsis here. It shows approximately how many pages it is. It's not this many pages in the print version, but they estimated, based on the size of the file that you upload. So it may take this long to read. It's It is about 140,000 total words. There are some reviews as I've told you the past. My books have a tendency to get some bad reviews. This person didn't leave a review. They just they just left with one star rating. So I don't know why this person gave it one star, but other people have have liked it. So you know, I couldn't stop reading this book and then it gives you just a little bit more e book information down here, and that's nets it. So this is It is very simple to get your books up for sale and kobo, and I want to show you something else. Here, too. This is a new feature that has been in beta testing. That's because I I was listening to Mark Dawson's podcast with one of the people who works at Cobo. I learned that there's this new feature that there, that they're going to be a releasing, and it's this promotions tab up here and so you can apply for promotions. So this I've got one active promotion. This I applied for a free promotion for this date range, and I've got to pending promotions. I applied for these. The Daily Deal Home page placements for the Summer of Crowd. Not a fine promotions. All you have to do is scroll through them and you see, you know there are free ones. There is the free editor's pick for romance there by two thrillers. Get one free sale. So here you could just read through the description of it to see if your book would be appropriate for this promotion and then just click get started. Now, this is something depending on on. When you're watching this lecture. Siri's. This might not be available to you, so what you can do is write to writing life, you know, just just get help here or send them an email and let them know that you would like them to . Well, please ask them to set up your promotions. Feature here and you may have to also ask them to set up the overdrive feature for you as well. But this and again these air, some more benefits of going wide and not just being exclusive to Amazon is that you have access to these promotions and you can get your book on overdrive on kobo. All right, so you also have to add a bank account. So to do that, click on the my account than payment information. So you go to my account than payment information. And again, I won't walk you through this stuff because I have my payment information on there. But authors air paid 45 days after the end of each monthly payment period provided that they have met a minimum threshold of $50 USD. And this is a Canadian company. So you don't have to fill up tax forms and you keep 70% of sales above to $99.45 percent below that. So this you are making more money for 99 cents and invalid 99 price points than you are on Amazon. So I discussed promotions here already. They're currently in beta testing. So you may have to request access to them and a school for scroll through the different promotions and choose one that's appropriate for your book. So this is the same tip that I've given you the last three for the last three benders, you know, have your information handy and play around with keywords and pricing. All right, so next we're gonna talk about create space versus Syndrome Spark. So what we have discussed already are the e book vendors. How to get your book up for sale on Amazon iBooks and Kobo and nook. So you know, the I but the e book version of that. Now we're going to show you how to get your print version up for sale on sites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Alright, so this is really important. If you want to sell print books, make sure to check outs this lecture and the following lectures on create space and in grub spark. If you're just publishing e books, then you can skip past this information. All right, So stick with us and we'll see you next time 24. An Introduction to Print on Demand Technology: CreateSpace vs. IngramSpark: all right. Looking back to from first drafted bestseller I'm John Lymphoma. And today we're going to be discussing Create Space versus Ingraham Spark. And so you've probably heard the reference these several times in my other lectures. And now I'm going to get into more detail. About what? These are all right. What are these? These are prints on demands companies. So what that means is they will print your books and distribute them when people order them . This is for the print copy. So say somebody orders a copy of your book on Amazon Amazon then alerts Ingram of the order and then in Groom will prince the book and they will ship it to the customer. And so that's how Prince on demands works is that you don't have to print out all hundreds or thousands of books and store them in a warehouse. You can just have the company printed and ship it when there's an order. So that's part of why it is self publishing. Industry has been blessing me. Is that previous to this, publishers would have to spends a lot of money upfronts guessing how many books that they might sell, and they would order that number of books, and then they would ship those books when the books were ordered. So but now, because a print on demand technology, it's it's so much easier when somebody orders a book, then they're printed and shipped. So you might be thinking, What's the catch? Print on demand books are a little bit more expensive, so that's that's the downside to this. If you're printing out hundreds or thousands of books, you can get those for cheaper than people who are buying the books on print on demands. And these companies, they make their money because they keep a percentage of each book that is sold. All right, so say there's an order. Somebody buys a print version of your book on Amazon. Amazon is gonna keep a cut of that sale, and Ingraham is going to keep a cut of that sale as well. And then you make a percentage, so you may sell your book for $17 in 95 cents and only get two or $3 from that sale. Because each of those companies is keeping a part of that. You get global distribution within Graham. This is fantastic, Ingram is, Ingram is one of the main distributors worldwide, which that what that means is that bookstores or libraries or whatever they can order books from Ingram and then those books, maybe the order books from 100 different different authors. Those books will all come in the same shipment, and they only have to pay one time rather than paying. Those authors are those publishers individually for all those books, So ingrown makes things very easy for booksellers and ends bookstores and librarians. So that's why it's important to gets on a to get your books distributed through through Ingram because it allows you to show up on these on these. These categories are in these in these catalogs, where sellers can buy the books and also when you publish a book through in grab, spark and create space. That's how you can get your print version of your book up for sale on stores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble dot com. And keep in mind this is a Mazar Barnes and Noble's online store, not their brick and mortar stores. In order to get your book in their brick and mortar stores, you do have to submit a copy of the book, as well as marketing plans and more information about the book to the main headquarters of Branson, Hubble's main headquarters. For them to determine whether or not they will supply your book and sell your book in their stores. So this is just to get the book up for sale online, and it'll sell it. What if you use income spark your book will be sold on on a number of difference stores online. All right, so which one of these is better for me? Create space is owned by Amazon, and they work very well with amazon dot com. So something that has has come up not necessarily recently. But that isn't that is an issue that a lot of authors who used Ingraham Spark is that there can be problems on Amazon and that your book, even though it is available, Amazon might put that it's not in stock or not available, which could turn off some potential buyers. So, and they also might say that it could take 1 to 2 to three weeks to ship the book. And so, even though that's that's not necessarily true, when somebody buys the book in group spark prints it and ships it. It's just that create space is a company owned by Amazon. So it just works better with Amazon so that this just keep in mind, there could be some problems. It doesn't. They're not really widespread issues. It's and I've found for my books This only happens when nobody has yet purchased a print copy of the book. So, you know, it might be wise. Is it off there just to buy one print copy of your book from some of the main Amazon stores when it's first on sale? So this way you might get rid of that issue it for income sparked, by the way. Okay, So for create space, the qualities okay, it is a quality book. You are gonna get a salad book. I have heard some reports from other authors who have published with printed with Create space, and they have mentioned that the quality can be inconsistent, such as Maybe the thickness of the book varies from book to book, or maybe the the actual the the cuts layout of the book might be off. So you might be looking at the cover page, and it looks like it's almost slanted. And so those that's part of the reason why I have not gone with create space is that the quality on Ingraham Spark is great. This is what the professional Big Five traditional publishers use it. This is going to give you quality equal to any of those those publishers. There are fewer size options with create space, and by size I just mean the actual physical dimensions of your book. You know, whether it's five by eight or 5.5 by 8.5 or whatever. There are fewer size options on create space, and there are significantly more on Ingraham Spark. So if you want a make like up, you know, really strange size for your book, it's You can probably do that on Ingraham Spark now create space offers extended distribution, which means that they can distribute. Your book can be distributed to more than just Amazon, but they use Ingram to distribute that book. So Amazon is gonna tear up Sorry, Create space is gonna take a cut in drums. Gonna take a cut. So and this is before it goes to the booksellers. So there couldn't be some some issues with that hands it didn. But that means is that by the time that the book gets to a book seller, say, a bookstore wants to buy your book and create Space has taken a cut of that book, and Ingraham Spark is taking a cut that's going to create a smaller discount for the bookseller. So typically, booksellers or bookstores, they will only buy a book. It is at a 40% or higher discount. And if you are going through extended distribution, even if you offer a 60% discount, that's only gonna translate to about a 25% discount when it the book actually gets to the bookstores. So it's It is very possible to sell your books to bookstores through this extended distribution option, and I know authors who have done it, but it makes it more difficult with in groom you can you have distribution through Ingram. You can cut out the middle man, and you can offer 40% or higher discount. Now keep in mind if you want to offer a 40% discount, you have to set the discount at 55% on Ingraham Spark because in Drum takes a 15% cut. From this I learned this the hard way. I went to a bookstore and the the book seller. She was interested in buying a copy of my book, and I told her that she would get a 40% discount by buying that book. When she looked it up in the system, it was only showing as a 25% discount, and I couldn't understand what was going on. Later, I figured out Ingraham takes a 15% cut. So learn from my mistake. Don't make yourself look like a fool like I did. I even called her back after I was like, You know, this is it's it's showing this 40% in the computer. And I was I was polite about it, you know? But she showed. Well, she said again, Oh, well, it's It's still showing 25%. So just be aware of that that Ingraham is going to take 15% from the discount you set for distribution. Alright, create space Books are not returnable and Ingraham sparked books are returnable now. That may seem like, you know, benefits of not be able to return the books that you know, customers buy a copy, and that's that. You know, you don't have to worry about abouts giving the money back for the sale. But the advantage to having books that are returnable is that bookstores again they will not buy books that are not returnable or they're unlikely to buy books that are not returnable because bookstores they have a limited number of shelf space and say a book is not selling that the after a month or two, that bookstore, they're going to return that book to the the publisher, and they're going to put somebody else's book on that's limited and valuable shelf space. So if you if you have books that are returnable bookstores, are much more likely to buy those, all right, So what advantage of create spaces that it's pretty easy to set up a book on and income spark. It's a little bit more difficult to set up, but it's not that hard, and I'm gonna show you how to do that. I'll go through it step by step in a different lecture, are in Create Space, is free to set the book up. However, Ingraham Spark charges $49 which is not, you know it's not Ah, huge amount For some people, that might be, ah, high bar to t play, you know, high barta toe hurdle. But if you are a member of the IBP A the Independence Book Publishers Association, one of their current benefits is that that church is waived. So you don't even have to pay that. And they provide I S P N's at create space and you needn't I ESPN at Ingram Spark so that they won't give you one for free on one of the thing about the charges to is that Ingraham Spark will charge you if you need to make any adjustments or changes to your cover or your interior file once you have already uploaded those, and that can get pricey. But again, if you're a IBP a member, one of the benefits of that was to have free changes to those files can create space does not have any ah program for e book distribution, and Ingram Spark does. So you can Anger Spark is basically an aggregator, just like smash words and drafted digital. If you would like to sell your e books on Ingraham Spark, you absolutely can do that. I have not done that because I prefer to go direct. But I did have that option, and I still do and create space has got great customer service. From what I'm told, Ingraham Spark, you are on your own. I mean that entirely. I'm being a little dramatic here. But every time I've had an issue, even a small issue, I have had to set aside about an hour because you I have always been on hold for about 1/2 hour before actually getting through to someone now. Recently, before I published this summer of Crowd, the page count was not showing on Amazon and I had spoken with three different people over a period of four months, and each of them said that that the page count would be updated, and after four months it still was not updated. And so that was frustrating, because I had to set aside about an hour off my day just to speak with these people on those three separate occasions just to get something so small that updated and that should have automatically have been updated right from the beginning. So with income spark, they will answer your questions. All right, they if you email if you call, they will get back to you. It could take a lot of time ends. You know, sometimes theater actions aren't as friendly as maybe they would be with a company like create space. All right, so can you do both? And the answer is yes. You can use create space to sell books on Amazon and use Ingraham Spark for everything else . The way to do this is to not allow for extended distribution in create space. And then just get your book up on Ingram Spark and that will take care of that. Your book will just be sold through create space for Amazon, and it will be sold in Group Spark for everything else. This this could be a great option. I was strongly considering doing this for both of my books understanding the L A Grand and the Summer of Crowd. But the thing that that's that stopped me from doing this was some of the stories I heard about the quality of the books on create space so the quality can be inconsistent. And to me, that's that's unacceptable. If somebody is going to be paying 16 17 $18 for a book. I want their experience to be the best possible experience they can get. And that's why I go within drum spark because I trust Engram Spark and you could make more money by selling on Amazon with create space and everywhere else with Ingram Spark because you get a higher royalty percentage from create space. If you sell through Amazon, then if yourself from Ingram Spark. But it's the opposites with every place else. So this is again. This is an option that you could do. A lot of people do this, so whatever works best for you, don't you know, uh, I hope that I'm not turning you off the create space too much about my concerns about the quality. This is just something I've heard from people and other people Talk about how wonderful the quality is, so you need to make a decision if you want. What you can do to is you can set your book up on both both places and then order copies and determined yourself which one you think is a better quality. All right, here's some tips. Know what your goals are? If your goal is only to sell print books on Amazon, then maybe just go with create space. If your goal is to get your book in independent bookstores throughout the world, I would definitely go with Ingram's Spark, you know, so every every author has got different goals with their writing. Some people don't even do print books. You know. Some authors only only published E books, and they only publish them on Amazon. So you know, everybody's got different goals. Find out what your goals are, and then use those goals to determine which which of these services would be best for you and again. Have your banking tax and metadata information handy because you will need those when you're setting up your books on either of these sites. All right, and so next What we're gonna do is show you how to set up a book on create space, and then we'll see how to do it on Ingram Spark after that. All right, so hope you stick around, we'll see you next time 25. How to Create and Sell Print Books on CreateSpace: right. And welcome back to from first draft, the best seller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be discussing how to set your book up on create space. Okay, so all you have to do here is making account, log into your account, click add new title and filling your books information and then so that that's gonna be pretty similar to what you've already done on the e book vendors. However, here you're gonna have toe add the interior as well as the full cover file, and it just basically followed the instructions. So here we go. I have logged into create space, and I made an account so I could show you how to do this. I am here in the member dashboard. So here, that will give you information here of status updates on projects, and they'll give you messages. So if you want to add a new title, either check your click here, add new title or just click. Add new title. All right? And then name your project. So first draft a best seller, and then you're gonna choose which type of project you want. We're gonna want to do a paperback and here. They give you a step by step guide on how to set up your book. So I am not going to go through this inasmuch depths. I've gone through some of the other platforms just because from everything that I hear creates base is really easy to set up a book on and also they guide you through the process . And so you could even do a streamlined process. I looked at this and it it seems pretty pretty easy to figure out. And so I think if you just have some basic idea about how how to fill out information on on , you know, in your book, or if you've already set up your book on Amazon, I think it's going to be pretty easy. But here I just I just clicked on the first option, that non expert option. And here I've got the title. You can add yourself as the author John La Palma. Oops, the Puma, authored by little pet peeve of mine authored by as opposed to written by. Okay, so this is written in English, then just hits, save and continue. And then here. This is where you can choose your option for an eye, ESPN. So you can either take the option. The i s bien that's create spaces science to you, which is free. Or you can create a universal I ESPN for $99 where you can customize or set your own imprints on that you can add your own publishing company or if you've already got your eye , ESPN you can just add it there. So let's just let's say we've got our own and I mean, it's gonna see if I can skip over this year. All right? Great. Okay, so All right. So here's information for the interior so you can choose the type of of prince that you need. If it's just black and white, which is gonna be, you know what 99% of you need you could just check this. If you want a full color book, you can check this, See if you've got pictures that you want to add to it or you know other designs and just keep in mind, though if you got a color book, I would go with syndrome spark because it's far more expensive to Prince of book with create space. Ah, color book on create space and then you can choose the paper color so most people would go with cream. Cream is just a standard color for fiction books. If you're writing nonfiction or more like a textbook for, like, reference materials, you might want to go with white. And then here, this is where you upload the books interior file. So this is this is by interior file for the Summer of Crowd. So I'll just show you what that looks like. This is just a pdf and I had pull Garris studios do the formatting here for me, says we already covered this in the formatting section. But this is what the Pdf looks like when it's been formatted. And as you see, it looks just like the inside of a book. So if I was going to Prince my book with create space, I would just add that interior file here. Here's where you choose the books size Now for the Summer of Crowd, I went with five by eight. So let's just pick that. And as you see here, there are there are fewer options. Then you would get on Ingraham Spark. All right, so then we'll come to the cover section here next. And this is where you can choose the finish for your book cover. Now, I have gone with the matte finish for my novels. You could go with the glossy finish. It doesn't necessarily matter. It just all comes down to taste. And but I I just like the way the mat one looks and you can build your own cover online as well. So going back to our cover design section, I didn't I didn't mention this, but this is an option to build a cover. But part of this course is creating a high quality and beautiful book. And after having checked out some of the what you can do with the covers here on creates base, I just wouldn't recommend it. I would definitely go with a professional when it comes to the cover. That makes a huge difference. All right, so So what you can do is, if you've already had your cover created by a professional is just the upload it. And so you just find the file and upload it here. This is what the file looked like for my book this summer of crowd. And as you see it's guts, you know that. This has got the whole cover here, and it's got the I s beyond on there. It's got everything that I would need so I could just upload this than to create space. All right, And then cover Herb. Sorry. Complete set up. Yeah, I want to move on here. So this tells you that they want it first. Ensure that the pdf submission has been the requirements have been met. So it could take then up 24 hours for you to get an email alerting you to the next steps. And then while you wait, you can set up your distribution channels. Oh, and then there's there's more that you can adhere so well, once. Once you get the file back, you can review it and then proof your book so you you can give it the yes or no that give you Ah, a galley toe look at And so you could look to see whether or not it looks okay. And then you can If it does, you couldn't approve that. And then you can go to your distribution section here so you could set up which channels you'd like to distribute the book on and then he could You can choose. Yes. So here, basically, in order for me to proceed, I need to fill out my banking and text information on the website here, and I and that's going to be using create space. And I don't want to fill out all of that information here. But if you just want to continue working through this strait space does give you step by step instructions on how to fill everything out. So I feel confidence leaving you in their hands. And if something comes up, you can always contact them. The I don't if you could see down here, it says contact support. And from what I hear, they're excellent and answered questions. So hopefully this is enough information to bring you to where you need to be for to get your books set up on create space. And I am going to be going into much, much more detail on in grub spark. So hopefully this again, I hope that this is this has helped you. Okay, so tips. Same tip is I've given you before about the banking Texan metadata information. All right. Next we're gonna talk about setting up a book on in Group Spark. Okay, so I hope to see you next. And I hope that you're having a great time so far. 26. How to Create and Sell Print Books on IngramSpark: All right. Welcome back to from First draft, the best seller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're going to be discussing how to set your book up on Ingram Spark. So we've already discussed what Ingraham Spark is. So now what will focus on is making an account. So, just like with create space, you want to log in click, add a new title and shoes, Prince E book or Prince An e book. Fill in your books information, add the interior and cover files and that's it. Now I'm gonna walk. You suit that process right now. All right. So I have logged into my in drum spark account here, and this is my dashboard. So this shows that two titles that I have set up and their status they're both available for printing and download. I can create an order where I can send these toe booksellers or libraries or reviewers or even order copies for myself to my family members who ever I want to send these books to I could send them here and in Gram's Spark has got a great service for shipping books worldwide. And you can promote the book you could edit the title here. What we want to do here, though, is we want to add a new title. So let's check this or click on that ad in the title, all right? And that brings us to this screen. So this is where we can decide whether we want to to do a print book, an e book or both. So I've only chosen ah, print book. If you want to do both, you can. So this is where you can put your title first draft to best seller ad, your subtitle, your language, a description. Add keywords and give a full description. All right, so it needed to be a certain number of characters, so that explains the excess there. All right. And so now we're going to add contributors, and this is where you can add yourself. So put your last name and your first name and then just leave this author role here selected, and then you could add information about the contributor. So if you'd like to add a bio, you can at any prior work, you can a location where you write at any affiliations. I'm a member of the Authors Guild, so I have added that all right now we'll continue on to step three, and this is where we'll categorize your book. So this is my imprints here, a mantra. Arts here, we're gonna find subjects. And if you have any questions, hover over these question marks and this will give you information about them. Has to get some pretty detailed information when you click on these. So this one this just wants us to add our first by sack subject. Look up. So if we let's say we want coming of age so we can choose from either of these options, So I would let's see if we said say, we've got a young adult fiction book, let's choose this coming of age one and that they told us toe or they advise us to add three. So go ahead and do that here. We can add if if the book pertains to a specific region, we can look that information up. So my one of my books took place in Mexico, so I would, you know, at the end, the region. All right, then, here we can add FEMA subjects. So these thes air interesting, because we can add mawr relevant information to the book to help categorise it. So the city write fiction. Let's let's click this down arrow here. This is going to give us more options and we're writing. Let's say we're writing general fiction and literary fiction. So again, check this little arrow here hands. We're writing modern and contemporary fiction, so we want to get a specific as possible, and this is as specific is that will allow us to be. So let's just check that. So we've got one FEMA subject and these. These are content oriented classifications intended for international in multi lingual discovery in sales. This this helps to identify the major categories for work, including genre topics and themes. Theme is used internationally by global distributors, aggregators and retailers. All right, so and you can even add qualifiers here. For example, if we got a geographic qualifier, let's say our book takes place in Asia and specifically in the Middle East and specifically in Jordan. Let's just check that here, all right, so it's that's gonna help to further classify this book, and then we want to pick a target audience. Let's say, Ah, trade general audience, and then we can add review quotes here if we'd like to. Justus, I've added in some of the online vendors and you can add a table of contents if you'd like . Does your book have photographs and of illustrations? Okay, so now we're getting into the prince formatting information. This is where we would check our print size. So I use five by eight for summer of crowd. See how many different options you have here compared with create space. I mean, they get pretty specific here. So that's one advantage of Ingraham Spark over create space. And now you can choose whether you want black and whites were color interior, and I would pick cream. If you're doing a novel of fiction work, I would just pick cream. It looks more like a traditionally published book, and if you have color in your book, you can chuck color as well here. The binding type. If you want to create a hardback copy, you can through Ingraham Spark. That's another advantage of income. Spark of Ingraham Spark. I just do You have used paperback so far, and perfect bounds are in the laminate type. I've always going with the Mets. Finish there and let's say the page count is 250. Let's continue on to step five. This is where you can add your I s bien and then set the retail price that city wanted. We want to charge $15 in 95 cents in the US This is where we can add our discount, so I would strongly recommend leaving it at 55%. So this way, book sellers will be enticed to buy that the book and make it. Yes. And I believe you have to pay for the delivery cost if you choose this. So I would just go with destroy. And as you see for our $15.95 book, that's 250 pages with with all the options that we selected about the color and this the paper type and the binding type and all that, we will make $2 in 98 cents for compensation. So and then just do the same thing for all these different stores. Select whether or not it's returnable like the wholesaler discount. And then you can you can add the global connect program. I'm not entirely sure what this is, but they do give a description here, choose the publication date and the on sale date. So this is Thea on sale date. This is the date when people can actually buy the book. So it's the date before which the book may not be sold by retail partners. So this is this is the date when people can actually buy it. I made the mistake of setting this a month early from this because I thought it would give booksellers the ability to buy it. But really, people on Amazon were able to buy the book as of this on sale date. That's how I was able to get reviews before the e book went live. So that's that's a strategy if if you would like to use that, your publication date might be February 20th. But if you want to set the on sale date for, like February 14th this way, the print version of the book is on sale on Amazon, and you can add reviews at that time because you cannot add reviews until the book has been published or readers are not ableto add reviews until the book has been published. So when a book is for up for pre order on Amazon. No one can get leave a review. So this is just the way you can get reviews before that e book goes on sale. All right, then we'll click. Continue, All right? They're not allowing me to continue with outs, creating a valid I s bien. So what I'm going to do is I'll just show you what this looks like from my book this summer of Crowd, and then eventually you're going to get to this part where you can upload your files. So this is where you can upload your pdf interior and your pdf cover file. And so once you have done that, then all right, they're gonna send you an eagle E, which you need to check over to make sure that everything looks good. And if it does, then you can approve that that title on the website here on Ingram Spark. Once it's approved, then your title will be available for order. And I'm just a bill for printing and download. So once you've set that up, then you could start sending out orders. A couple other tools here, I'd like to to alert you to so the resource is here. So this is on the Ingram Spark website, so you can go to Resource is tools, and these are some pretty handy things that you can use. So there's the print and ship calculator, the publisher compensation calculator and the weight in spine with calculator. And you can also get the cover generator template, so you'll need this when creating your full cover. And this is something you can give to your designer, and I'll talk a little bit about this here in a second. But I would just go with this, this one here first. This is gonna tell you how much money you will make, depending on the dimensions of your book. So it's just said trim size. It doesn't really matter unless it gets really big. So it's pick black and white interior on Let's see. Well, the only option for that size is white, says pick cream. The binding type will go with perfect bounds. Let's go with a Matt finish. Let's say we got a monster book. It's 400 pages. We want to sell it for 13 95 with a 55% wholesaler discounts, and the market is in the US as you'll notice. At that price, you only make 24 cents. The book costs $6.4 to create. So you would want to raise this price. Let's try 16 95 and then here you go. You're making a dollar 59 purse per sale. So this smaller this is, the bigger this is going to get. See how? Reducing 200 pages. You just doubled the amount you're gonna make for that. So these just thinks that keep in mind, the lower your page count, the more money you're going to make. All right, let's go to the cover template generator. Just you have an idea of what this is, too. So when you're ready to create that cover, full cover image. So this is what you want to give to your cover designer so that they can create this This this cover it was created using that's cover template generator, and they'll have a specifically designated space for the I S P n. And though they'll give specific dimensions for the spine and all of that, So this way your book comes out looking great when it's when it's printed. Okay, so So that's That's where you would get that information. It's just in the resource is and Tools section. All right, if you have more questions about this, you can check it out here also, just to let you know about the distribution networks. Here are the distribution partners for print books. So in the US, books are distributed through the Ingram Book Room, and they're made available to tens of thousands of retailers, libraries, schools, Internet commerce companies and other channel partners, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble chapters Indigo, which is a Canadian company, and other well known book retailers and wholesalers across North America and then in the UK It's made available here and in Australia and New Zealand in these stores, and if you want to see about the distribution for online partners, you can check that out here, too. So these are all the different stores your book will be in if you published the E book version through them. Okay, so again you'll have to approve the E proof once you set up your files on in Group Spark. So just follow the instructions in the email, review your e proof for any errors and then accept or decline it. If everything looks good, just accept the changes. If the proves the title will be live, then you can order copies. So tips use those help bubbles with the excrement earthy question marks in them. And also you're going to want tohave that Google doc with the tax information and all that handy and you'll to do that, you'll just click account here and then fill out all of that information. Okay, eso next up, we're going to be discussing Good Reads, which is a website where you can upload your book and readers can find out more information about it. They can raid it, they can review it, they can add it, toe their favorite lists. And it's a great interactive community. A lot of a lot of users has millions of users on this website, so it's something you should strongly consider using. And I'm gonna show you step by step, how to set your book up on it, how to run giveaways, how Teoh set up your author profile. So a lot of good information coming up don't miss this. Next one is something I highly recommend 27. How to Use Goodreads to Increase your Book's Visibility and Get More Readers: All right. Welcome back to from first draft of best seller I'm John lymphoma. And today we're gonna be talking about good reads. All right. So what is good reads good Reads is a website where readers can rate books, review books and just check out new books since the site entirely dedicated to people who love reading dedicated to books. All right, so there are a lot of great things that you can do on good reads. You can join groups where you discuss books you can do give ways you could Dio blog's, you know, in your book can be ranked on sites like Dystopia. It's not a store, so you can't actually buy books on Good reads. It's just more of like it's kind of like the Facebook for books, and it is run by Amazon. All right, So why is it beneficial toe authors? You can create an author page and you can list all of your books on there. So you list your books and you can join groups where you can find potential reviewers. You don't wanna you know, you don't want to join groups and then start spamming. People say, Hey, read my books, but you can join. You can join groups, and you can get to know other people. You can get to know readers. You can get to know authors, and you may find more readers this way. You can also find reviewers, and I'll show you how to do that. Here. Ah, you can run giveaways now. This is something that has recently changed so previous to think January of 2018. You could run free giveaways for your books. Me or you could list free giveaways for your books on Good reads. So you just set up a giveaway on good reads. You look good, reads, lists the give away, and then good reads. Members can enter your competition for your giveaway, not say you're gonna you sign up to give away five books. Anybody who's on good reads can can't just check a couple boxes, and they can enter the competition to win one of those copies. And this is a great way. There was the only this is still a great way. It's still a great way for four authors to get their book out there, and its people can also add your book to their to read shelves. So again I'll explain how all this works and that just gets its seen mawr on good reads. So to help build a little bit of buzz for your book. Now, however, they charge believe it's 100 and $19 to run and give away, which to me is just way too much considering that you're not really selling any books doing this. You know, you're like you're paying money to give your book away, and I don't think the benefits outweigh the cost. So I'm I might not run giveaways again, but I'm still going to show you how to do it. So this way you you could make that decision yourself. Also, you can interact with readers on this website, but it's crucial that you don't respond to reviews, especially the negative reviews. But again, you people are going to be able to leave reviews and ratings of your books. You absolutely do not want to just choose somebody out for having given their opinion on your book. What could happen and what has happened is that there are people who will band together. Teoh give certain authors one star reviews scathing one star reviews and even saying personal things like Kill yourself in, You know your should never write another book or, you know, I think the terrible, terrible things. And since it in last few years, good reads has changed his policy on those types of reviewers, and I think some people have been have been banned from using the site. But you definitely do not want to incur the wrath of good res users by responding to reviews. So and it's this is nothing. This is not happens to me or anybody that I know, So I don't want you to feel like this. This is like Lord of the Flies style environment, where anything goes at any point, you're gonna be destroyed by roving gangs off Internet trolls. It just just a zlotys. You abide by the rules, you should be fine. You can also check data on your book. You can check to see who's adding their book to their to read shelves. You can see who's currently reading your book. You could see what shelves people have added your book to, because they can add it to more than just there to reach shelf and they can make up their own shelves. They might make a, you know, best y a books of 2018 shelf. So and this you can request reviews as well in approved areas. A lot of great benefits to good reads. So, uh, just in a moment I'm gonna show you how to do all this. So go to good reads dot com and set up a profile. It takes like a minute at most, it's it's azizia. Citing a per facebook. So, yeah, I just go to a good reads dot com. This is my home page. So you see here there are updates from people who I'm friends with and also shows what books I am currently reading. Reading Ah, girl in a band's sonic youth fan. Oh, and you can you can leave a general update. So see how we have updates here by clicking here. General update, this is really hard to find. So I wish somebody would have showed me how to do this because it took me a while to figure it out. But, you know, you just I believe in update all of your followers and friends can get that update. Okay, so this here's you know, just places that you can go on. The website there are has taught is there's so much to do on this website. You can find deals. You can. They do an awards programme every year. There are Give aways new releases that have recommended there's lists like List topia. People can create lists with their favorite books. You know, they might say best books in 2018 and then people will add their favorite books than a list them in rank of popularity and in the community you conjoined groups, which I showed you a little bit about how to do that in the reviews, a lecture, discussions. I don't really even know what this is. I've never done it. Quotes ask the author quizzes. I mean, there's there's a ton of stuff that you could do here, So I'm gonna show you my profile here. So I highly recommend setting one of these. These guys up here. All right, so you see my information. Here's my bio. You can add pictures. This shows all the books that you've rated and what your average rating is. People will follow you there. They can't follow you At least and they'll get all the updates that you that you make on the website. They also get information about new releases that you have or when you're running a giveaway. So this is this is great. You want to get followers, and these are just, you know, it's just fans of your work. So and people can also ask you questions. This is an approved place to talkto readers because they're the ones that are initiating the conversation, all right, and this also lists your books and all the ratings for your books. So you see, I've got an average rating overall here of 3.59 Just a heads up. Good reason reviewers can be pretty harsh. Alright, so that's that's something that's sort of known in the publishing community. And I think to just in the genre that I write in, I think it's It's a lot of the authors that I like the books that I love. They're rated, you know, in this this rage. So I think, because, you know, again, I'm ready about people who are addicts, people who have got mental illness, people who are living on like the emergence of society, some people have got very strong opinions about people like that, stories that may be more character driven than plot driven, and so that that accounts for probably about 99.9% of the poor reviews that I've gotten. But you see some of them, you could see what the average rating is, and you can see that some of my books have done better than others. Now this has got 169 ratings, which is pretty darn good for independently published book. You know, a lot of books they don't they don't crack more than 10 to 20 ratings. So this part of how I got so many ratings was again that I queried bloggers for months. I left posts on groups in good reads asking for reviews. I ran a Net galley campaign for this book. I gave copies of this book away on Amazon. Think it gave away about 5000 copies and just know, too. That's when I have given the book away for free like on Net Galley and just gave it away Free and Amazon. This plummeted when I stopped giving away the book for free. This rose at one point. This rating was as low. Is this one right now? So this one is starting out pretty much where that that did. But then, over time, I think that people who who are truly fans of the book have been coming to it in spite of the bad reviews. And so I've had him. I've had a really good rating ever since then, you know? So just keep these things in mind when you're doing giveaways or things like that, You may be setting yourself up for some poor reviews, but if you've written a great book, people will continue to come to its end. The rating should improve. All right, now this this I written a couple of blawg posts so you can check more of that outs. Gives more information about what I'm currently reading. All right, so this is just my author page, and then here the author dashboard. This is extremely important. This is a place where you can get a ton of great data. Aziz, you see, this just sums up all of your stats. So I've got four published works here on the site. I've got 12,198 people on this website have added my books to read. I have had 229 ratings. 83 people have reviewed my books. The book is currently on 11,886 people's to read shelves, and you continue to read all this stuff here. I got through to 36 followers, and I have added that many books. So whatever here, right, so let's let's move on. So here are my books. So this is the first book I published 2nd 1 published in the third when I published, and so you could see information about like the people who are currently reading the book. If you click that, you could see who added the book to read when you click there on. Then again, people can rights questions to you. And then here's some blood posts you can you can set up ads. I have found their pretty ineffective. A lot of authors say the same thing. Here is a list of all the giveaways that I have run, and they used to be able to give away a portion of your book. I give away the first chapter and there 69 people have downloaded it. And also this is important to when we get to the Facebook page. A lecture. This is how you can add a good reads tab to your Facebook page. It's really simple. All right, so now let's just take a look. Let's take a look at my book here. Developing Minds. This is the books page. This isn't exactly what a user would see when they look at the page. This is your view, you know? So there's gonna be some information that you see that they don't. But generally, this is this is how it looks. All right. So you got the book's cover here. This is where people rate the book so you can give it 1 to 5 stars. I have read the book. Clearly, this is what the rating is so far. Rating details. This is this is a a list of all the people who have how they have rated your book. So I've got 63 5 star reviews out of 169 ratings, so it's pretty self explanatory. There. 52 people have left reviews for it. You can If you click this, it'll take you right to the Amazon page for it. This lists which libraries the books in. So this is this is the world's Cat website. This is just the website where you can find where your books are, which libraries your books are in. And so my book is in nine libraries, at least nine libraries that have registered it with this system. I know it's been in other libraries as well, and so this just lists all of them to see if it's even in a library in Switzerland. So that's world cats. That's just another thing that they linked to here on. Good reads here are different shelves that people have put your book in. These are labels that people have used to categorize your book. So as you see some of these, you know they can be. Sometimes they could be funny. They could be ridiculous. Sometimes they're just downright nasty, like I've been in there like, I couldn't even finish it that list or who that sounds interesting. I can't find it. I don't even know what the heck that means. Summer reading, teaching books. So you know the people are able to classify this if you want to see who is the person that added your book to this list. Click on them also. Let's see, Let's just click humor here. This is going to show you Ah, list of some of the top humor books right now. Now, if you can get on this this list, you know, if if enough people have added you, your book could show up on this list and then other people can see you there too. So I've had my book developing minds at least show up on several of these lists. And then I took a screenshot, and I put that screenshot on my social media, and I patted it to my Web page just to show that people are are adding, it's to these these pages. Okay, so this is this is some of the basics about the page, you know, to show your bio here, it shows what lists people have added it to. This is listo Pia, by the way, eso this is This is what dystopia looks like. So somebody created this list. It's called anticipated 2015 literary fiction. So people added their favorite books from 2015. My book was included in that. And you could see the, you know, the ratings here, the number of people who added them and again, like, you know, as I say about ratings to see here, this is just got a really high rating. This has got a lower rating. This has got a fairly low rating, and it's rated number three here, you know, go set a watchman rated number four. So just because ah book is rated low doesn't mean that people don't care about it. People will leave reviews. You know, you could see like this. 75 people like this one and 35 people commented on the review. And so, you know, this is what people wrote. This is where I say I do not do not comment. Don't you know, don't interact with people who have left reviews? You know, there's a few other things here to to look at. I was going to say I think it's about it, but so we could check out the book stats. We can see how many people added it. So 394 people added it on this day. This is because this was the last day of Ah, good reads giveaway. And so a ton of people were adding it. This was the first day of a new give away the last day of a give away. So this is this word, the these spikes come in. This is kind of hard to read here. It says, You know the greenest to read. If you hope for over, you can get the details. The blue is when they were added, so if you click on it, it will give you that information ratings. It's really hard to see, but I think somebody rated it that day. But because this is difficult to see. If you click here where it says click here for breakdown, you'll get that information. So you see, this day, 394 people added the book to their to read shelf, and then one person. I think this is the ratings, right? Yes. So this is rating. So? So. Two people raided the book that day. One person rated at this day, two people raided it that they one person rated it this day. So this is just This is valuable information you can find out when people are adding your book when they're adding their reviews and you can see, then, you know, is there anything that you're doing that has led to that? You know, is there any Izzard promotion that you're doing that maybe leading to some of those spikes ? You could also get recent status updates. So this this reviewer of these kids were the best. Still, my lord, she was so excited for this book. So as they're posting as they're posting status updates for the book, you will see them. Oh, and also to go back to the author dashboard. You can just click this off their dashboard, and it brings you back to this page. All right, so this is this is just sort of a general overview of what good reads is. Now, if you want to add your book So once you once you logged into good reads you can, you know, you set up your accounts, go to your dashboard, click this, add a book, and then add your title and add you is the author. You put your ESPN part of white of the eye ESPN section before this, so that you had this information when you were putting your good Reese page together. Get at your publisher. You know, just add all of your information here. So this is where you could dip back into your Google, doc. Oh, just keep this. Just keep his open whenever you're doing any of this stuff. All right? So then you would just submit that. Create the book you used to have to join a group. Colds are librarians group here and have one of the librarians on good reads. Add your cover on librarians or just kind of like the people that volunteer to keep the site running. But now it looks like you can just click this and add your title this way, which is much, much easier Are your cover image. I'm sorry you can add your cover image this way. So that's that's pretty much it. So you submit this and then you'll get a page. Your book will show up like, you know, here for you. And then let's say now you want to run a giveaway. You don't have to do it like that. You can click on the cover again and then go to list a giveaway. And this is where previously you could just just add your give away information, set up your give away. Now you have to pay 100 $19 for it again. This is something that you're probably not going to get Book sales directly as a result of giveaways mean it's sometimes I see, like one or two purchases at the beginning or end of a giveaway, because people will be interested in your book, maybe, and then click on the Amazon page and then, you know, maybe by the book. But generally giveaways on good reads they are not. Do not going to sell books directly As a result of these, you may generate some interest in your book and late around, you know, weeks or months later sell books. But to me, this $119 fee is just I don't know it. It's just not worth it. And to me, it feels like a slap in the face to independent authors. I think that this is going to hurt the good reads program. In general, you know, is it was a wonderful way for authors to get their work out there and for readers to get their hands on on books. Um, but and again, I haven't done this, so I don't know how to specifically set these up. Now, you know, the little show you how to set it up. It's pretty pretty common sense. They'll just ask you again for, like, the description For what? What to put in your giveaway. So I'll show you what some some giveaways look like. Let's go to the most requested tap. These the most requested books on the website. So you see, this is a print book that giveaways get, and in six days, they're giving way to copies. And these the time periods for they give away. These are the countries the book is available. And if you want to enter it, you click. Answer. All right, but see how this person wrote. Oh, this is for a Christmas Carol. So this this, you know, Chris Christmas Carol doesn't really need very much in the way of sales copy. People know what a Christmas Carol is, but maybe here this the memory box. See how this author included all of this information in her giveaway. So I would recommend just if you've got anything like this, like clearly, if you're in New York's Times special offer you're probably not taking this course right now, but if you if you've won an award, you know, put filth to prove to feel free to put award winning author. If, like me, you've had, ah, title climb up the number one best selling charts and Amazon. You can put number one Amazon best selling off there and then feel free to put some review blurbs. This one got five stars from San Francisco Book Review and then they puts they puts the book description here. All right, so this is that's just a couple of recommendations. I would not just put your book description. I would put something, you know, make it a little sexier, right? So if you have any accolades, put those in here. If you have got a really good blurb from from a reviewer, just add a couple lines, a line or two from that blurb, and then you can just add your back cover copy here. Your book description, you know. So that's that's how I would set up a giveaway. I've been pretty successful doing it that way. And also, if you want to give away autographed copy, you may get more people to enter. So this person has got 9371 people entering again. This there a difference categories here that that's you know, you can click on these. The ones that were recently listed, ending soon the feature one. These are probably the ones that people that pay a lot of money to, uh, to be featured. I don't know. I don't know what that one is. This this new, so that that's pretty much it for the giveaways program I showed you. What? The title Find groups to get reviews. So you would just go to communities groups. And then you can just search, You know, if you want to search for reviewers, the viewers and then groups may pop up here that you can you can join if you want. Just joined groups for fund. Just feel free to browse. Um, okay. All right. So I'm gonna go back to my power point presentation. So I showed you this information. Why the giveaways or beneficial? They get your book out into the world. You could possibly get reviews. I did recently get a good review for my book Understanding. The alec ran from a guy. I sent a review copy, too. Get people to add your books on there, there to read shelves. Or maybe the make up a shelf for your book. And it just helps you to get more visibility. Because when you when you add books to your shelf, let's go back to this little news feed. When you add books to yourself when you rate books or whatever, the people who follow you or your friends are able to see your activity on the site, you know? So so this person just finished reading the weight of life. All right, so this this showed up on my news feed. When people are adding books, it'll show up on your your news feed. Well, you when your friends are adding them. So this just helps to get your book out there. You'll get more visibility. Okay, So again, if you want to get reviews, you can post your book in groups you can run giveaways. One thing to it's important to create a great profile that attracts people. You notice I used a professional image here. I'm sorry going to my dashboard to go to your profile, so I use the professional image here. That's I had a photographer shoots and they they touched up for me. So this is something that I would recommend you using. Don't just take a picture of yourself and then posted up there. You know, this is this is gonna be the the you suffer a lot of people to give me the first time they see you first thing they're introduced to use to make sure you've got a good looking page and make sure that your bio was spelled correctly. You know, take some time with this. This is you're representing yourself when you're through your profile, right? So some tips again. Keep your metadata on a google doc like that's Give me my tip for every single lecture here . Oh, do not be sales. The or spam people. Don't just add people as friends for the purpose of selling your books to them. Do not just join groups so that you can tell everybody. Hey, everybody, by my book Now, you know, don't don't send people messages asking them to buy your books. Just don't. Spam people don't be sales. He don't be annoying because you could actually get banned from good reads. By doing this, I make sure to follow rules. Okay, so coming up next, we're going to discuss a library thing. And a lot of what I just explained to you about good reads is going to overlap with the library thing Lecture. And so library thing is just a similar site to good reads and that you can add your books there and you can interact with with readers, you know, inappropriate approved ways. You couldn't create giveaways for your books, you conjoined groups. So it's It's another great site to use. And I'm gonna explain to you how to use that next, so I hope you stick. 28. How to Use LibraryThing to Increase your Book's Visibility and Get New Readers: All right, Welcome back to from First draft, the best seller. I'm John lymphoma. And today we're gonna be talking about library thing. Okay, so what is library thing like? Greasing thing is is similar to good reads in that It's a website where readers can rate review and check out new books on a lot more. You know, they conjoined groups, they can do giveaways. There are rankings of the books. It's again, it's not a store. You don't buy books on library thing, and it's beneficial to authors for a lot of the same reasons that good reads is beneficial to authors. You can create an author page you can Mr Books, you conjoined groups and run giveaways and interact with Ruby with readers again. Don't respond to the reviews, and you can check data. All right, so how to set up a profile? What you want to do is just go to a library thing dot com. All right, so this this is my home page here for library thing. Once again, it's it's very simple. You just have toe sign up on the website library thing dot com. Don't Here I I added. This is the books that I added to my profile. I'm just going to click on this summer of crowd so that these are the books that I had entered into the system. And obviously, you know, I entered my own book here and I added the information for it. All right, so here we can see four members have added my book, The Summer of Crowd, to read. I don't have any reviews yet, and this is its popularity so far on the Web sites, it's not very good. Um, I haven't really done much interacting on this website here yet, and there are no reviews yet and no conversations. But if there was a conversation here, you could click the link and you can see if other people on the website are talking about your book again. Here's just information about it. There's some tags that I used to describe the book. You could see the people who have added your book here to read these air the tags so you can click on these and find other books that that are in similar categories. And then there's a time that you could do with with this website. People can recommend books to you, you can add lists. I'm not really sure what this feature is on. I don't really know. It's It says that there are too few copies to analyze whether you will like it. So I guess there's ah, ranking or rating system here to see whether or not based on previous books you've read, if you would like it. So far, nobody's been talking about it, and nobody has reviewed it. I have added these reviews these reviews from publications like Kirkus and Readers Favorite , and so add one of these. Just click at a review, and then you can add that. And then here I I add information as well. So if you have a Siri's, you could put Syria's information in. If there was a different title that you previously used to get at that here at the publication date can have the characters. I added the important places. Okay, so and this is the epigraph here, the dedication. You can add quotes. There's a ton that you can put of information you can put on this page and then, you know, it just it just keeps going down here. So as much information to your page as you would like to. And you see here there there is, Ah, click here. There's a profile, my profile. So this just lists the number of members who have added my books, the number of reviews that I have gotten my popularity and the ratings overall that I've gotten so far from my books. I have been favorited zero times and I have zero events. Okay, so again, it's just people who have added my works. People who have added my books there, you could see them, and I have just added information about myself. I've added a short bio and then these just a list of the ratings that people have given my books, right? So this is what the author profile looks like. As you see, it's not as clean looking as the good reads page. I think library thing kind of like the US Copyright Office website is not the most attractive website the but it does get the job done. Now, if you want to join our groups, you could do that by clicking here, and there are a whole bunch of different groups that you can join. I would recommend getting on here early reviewers. All right. Said this is the group. Early reviewers, in order to run a review are up. Sorry. Giveaway of your books. Just click here the list of available books. Then go up here to member giveaway, and then click your post a giveaway and then fill out this entire form here. It also noticed that you can give out e books, but you cannot give away books that are freely available elsewhere. This means, for example, you cannot post e books that you also provide free access to on your website. So make sure to read all the rules here. And once you have filled out all of your information, hit at book. All right, that once you've added your book, if you want to check out what the other books that are being given away look like so here again, I'm in the member giveaway here. The list of books You can sort these by the end, date or start date of the books. If you have just set your giveaway up, yours is going to be at this the top of this pile under the start date tab. Now, if you want to check out a few of these books just to kind of give an idea of what you can put in your giveaway are the what to write in the copy of your giveaway. The office may write a letter to readers letting them know that they're looking for reviews , letting them know a little bit more about the book. Often, authors will put in review blurbs, and they'll ask them specific locations where readers can leave their books. You'll notice here this author is giving weight 100 copies of their book and 38 members have requested it. All right, So what happens is that when the give away is over live, everything will email you with a list of the winners and you then email each of those winners and give them a copy of your book. Now, what you can do when you are emailing these people is don't just give them the book. Thank them for entering the competition. Ask them. You know, if they would be so kind as to leave a review, you know, then give the sites that you like for them to leave the review on Also give them a link where they can sign up to your mailing list. So you're not just getting one review from these people, but maybe potentially turning them into lifelong readers or customers who made by more of your books in the future or a few more of your books in the future. And if you include a link from a website like Book Funnel, which I'm gonna explain to you how to use in the next lecture, you can then very easily give these. Give these potential reviewers a copy of your book. I mean, you can send their putting attachment in an email with the PdF for Moby Repub file of your book. But it would be easier to use a link from a website like book funnel to actually give these reviewers the copy of the book. Okay, so now we discussed how to set up giveaways. Now, what we should do is let's discuss house actually set up your books on library things so that you can run these giveaways. So if you look down here, it says here, you know, if you haven't yet search for your library thing, Author page, When you're there, you'll see it. Is this you box in the upper right corner. Click on there to request author status. If you don't find your books by searching, you may need to add it to library thing. All right, so chances are you're going to have to add your books the library thing first in order to show up on the search as a library thing author. So let's do that. First, let's go up to add books. I'm gonna open this in a new tab here. All right, so what you can do first, if you want to, is just type in your book's title and then just hit search. If it's in the system, it's going to show up over here. So my book is in the system because I did add it. So you can also add the book manually by clicking this link down here. Add manually, or you could import it, but usually you'll have to add this book manually. Then, after you have done that, you can come back here to this page, and now I'm not exactly sure where on this websites to find this page. What I did was just I just typed into Google how to set up a library thing author account. And this was the page that came that show our came to. And so this is just www dot library thing dot com slash about underscore authors dot PHP. So if you want to type that, you could do that. And then where you'll go next is to click this search here. It's really difficult to find, but and then, if you search for yourself, just type your name up there and see how my books show up here. And then if I've already added my books, so I don't need to check anything here to add them. But if you have not yet added your books, you can add them than to your account. And tips are the same as on good reads here. So make sure to keep the metadata on a Google docks. To this way, when you're filling out your profile, you've got all of that information handy again. Don't be sales the or spam people. This is a good way to get your account suspended or completely bands and just follow all the rules. So up next we're gonna be talking about two websites called insta freebie and book final. I previously mentioned book funnel on these air great websites where you can give away copies of your books very easily. You can get in exchange for email addresses or you condemn them away without any stipulations. But these Airways that you can grow your mailing list and game readers, right, So make sure to check this out, and I hope to see you the next election. 29. Grow your Mailing List Using Instafreebie and BookFunnel: All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're going to be discussing into the freebie and book funnel. Okay. So instead, freebie. This is a website where you can give away free e books in exchange for email addresses. And this website has got integration with male chimp and mailer light. So this just means that whenever people download a copy of your book, they will automatically get put on your list in in Middle Chimp or Miller Lite. And then once that they've entered your list, what you can do is you can hit him with an auto sequence so you can automatically have asshole Siris of e mails sent to that subscriber. And you don't have to do anything you know, says it's This is something where you know, once you get it set up, you're just on autopilot, and you can get tons of new readers passively without having to do anything other than just setting this up. So that's a great way to get new subscribers. You can also do group giveaways where a bunch of authors get together and they give away their books in kind of like a big group or a big bundle and that anybody who downloads the book, they're giving their email address in exchange for that. So this is another way for you to get a lot of email addresses and to build your mailing list and you can pay yearly or monthly. Right now, I'm gonna show you what it's the freebie Looks like. So you just want to go to instant freebie dot com, so just www dot insta i n s t a freebie is our I'm sorry. F r e b i e dot com This will bring you to your home page or this is this is my dashboard here. So I'm clicking that these air my three titles here that I've set up and so we'll just click on developing minds in American Ghost Story here. Okay. And this brings up the books page. Now, the way to get this all set up is just to click on this book options tab up here. So this is where you can and all of your books information that cover the pub file the Moby and you remember from our formatting lesson how we create these files. OK, So this is where that information comes into play. So just fill out all the information up here, and then you get ah, link here and I'm gonna just open this in a new tab. This is what people see when they opened this link and says here, sign up for Jonathan Lomas mailing list and get a free copy of developing minds in American Ghost Story. So you just have to enter your name and email below, and then you get a copy of the book, okay? All right. And CC have got thes thes little quick links here. So if you click these, you can promote your book as well on these social media platforms, not a such a book up. Click this view and edit to give away Tab here, this button and then you're going to have a number of options here so you can distribute another any number of books that you want. I've got an unlimited plan, so I've already given away 404 155 copies of my book. You could set this up. Teoh, Whatever number you'd like to say, you only want to give away 10 copies. You could just give away 10 copies and just click edit. In order to do that, you can also set up an expiration date. If you only want to give away books for a certain amount of time, I don't have an expiration date. If your book is exclusive to instant free being, say you're only giving it away for free on this website, you can check Yes, here. So again, do that by editing. Is this an advanced reader copy? No advanced reader copies are just copies that you would give before the book is published . This is not a private giveaway. Email opt in is required. Now if you even if you give away the book without captain required, people can still voluntarily give you their email addresses. I, however, make it mandatory because the only reason why I have my books on here is because I wants to together email addresses. That's why I'm paying into freebies. So I didn't make that a requirement. There is no password enabled for this, but you can put a password, and if you'd like to, I have added an E pub, PDF and Mobi file so that people can download any of those they'd like. And the mailing list. This this integrates with your mail chimp. All right, So are you Are your mailer lights? So this is the list that I have set it up for and the mailing list here so you can choose whichever list. These are all the list I have on Male Chimp, and this is going to show you the number of people who have downloaded the book on those days. As you see it, it started out pretty, pretty strong, and it sits trickled down. We still get some people downloading copies of it, but there will be long stretches of days where nobody downloads it on and it's the freebie will offer this book to people who who just come to this website looking for deals. So, you know, though they'll promote your book, they also expect for you to promote it so again you want to share it on social media. Okay, so one of the other good features of this website a feature that I have not used but I've heard good things from Is this here? The group giveaways so group gribble ways again are give aways where you can get together with other authors and give away your books together, and so you can create one yourself or you conjoined one so you can select the book that you want to give away. Let's just say I want to give away developing minds and then you choose to give away. So you could just look through these to see which one mites be appropriate for your book. And then again, you gain a ton more email addresses this way. And so people are. People are growing their mailing lists very rapidly as a result of doing things like this. One drawback of this of the whole mailing list crazier people giving away books in exchange for email addresses is that people are our subscribers. Readers Air started to get email fatigue in that their members of so many lists that's they've stopped opening emails from authors or what they'll do, too, is they'll just give their email address and then once they get the free book than they just unsubscribe. And so you know you may, you may find the same thing happens with you. I've heard a lot of authors commenting on this, so it's not if it just happened to you. It's not just happening to you. It's happening to pretty much everybody. All right? And so I want Oh, I'll let you know about the pricing here too. Oh, okay. All right. So here is the pricing for instant freebie. And so you can pay, uh, here $50 or months. And then you would get this for that price for $20 a month, you could add subscribers to a mailing list, and it's got integration with Miller Lite for male chimp. It's got customizable giveaways and you contract giveaway success. So this is the plan that I use and it is it's it does get pretty expensive on that. You know, when you do this with book funnel Or maybe, you know, I'm a member of a couple other organizations. Like I said, the ibp a. So it does get pretty pricey each month. I I have budgeted specific it amount of money each month for things like this, and I'm starting to find that the returns are diminishing on this website, so I may stop using it soon. You may find that it's really helpful. So, you know, every every author is different so keep all that information in minds. You can also use a free plan. The only problem is that you don't get the email addresses. So that is the number one reason why I used this website. So for me that this wouldn't make sense, okay? And so that that that is instant freebie there. There are probably more features on here that I am not aware of. And so here I said, pay yearly or monthly. We can just ignore this yearly you would pay monthly for instant freebie. All right, so book funnel Book funnel is a website that makes it incredibly easy to send e books. All you have to do is add your books and all of your information, and then you can create download links. You can also get data on how many people have downloaded your book as opposed to how many people have viewed the page for your book. And you can also find out which devices they're downloading that book onto, whether it's their Kindle e reader or their iPad or whatever. It also has integration with active campaign, a Weber convert kit, male chimp and Baylor lights, and you can do bundles, which are similar to the group giveaways on It's the Freebie. So let's go over to book funnel. So you get for this one you would just do w w w dot book funnel dot com I am on my dashboard in book funnel, so you have to set up in accounts, you know, and then you would come to a dashboard. Ah, these are all the books that with books or short stories or screenplays that I have listed on book funnel. And it'll tell you how many books have been downloaded so far that month out of how many downloads you have on your plan. So I have a plan that allows for 2500 downloads in a month. Um, there are bigger plans, and there are smaller plans. What's great about this? Those that tells you how many downloads you had that day, how many have had that month and how many total you've had? It also gives you data on the percentage of people who download the book after viewing your page. All right, so if you want to add a book, just hit, add new, and then I'm going to show you what's, uh, my book this summer of crowd Looks like So this is this is the information that I have added for this book. If you know when you add a new it's get hurt. When you hit, add new. It's gonna look like this. So you would just add, Well, your book label. This is just what you see. Not what's anybody else sees, so you could write whatever you want. Here. This is what people will see, So make sure the type that that correctly put your name in the Amazon Basin number. I'll show you what this means in the Amazon section. This is just a book tagline. I added this little blurb from Kirkus Reviews just because I fifth you know this sounds, it's quick, and it's it gets the message across. And then to give it books, description, hit, save book. So that's how you set up your book. Oh, sorry. And then at then you have to add your book files too. So here you add your e pub, Moby pdf and then the cover image. Then just hit save book. That's how you would set your book up on book funnel. So sit close. I don't want to save that. Um, and then when you're on the actual books page here. So now you've made you added your book. This is what it will look like. And then you can get your download stats If you want to see which of the copies that people are downloading. Most people have downloaded a pdf off my book this summer of Crowd, and this is what they're reading it on. Most people have read their book or my book on a PC. All right, so this is the link. You can create a number of different download links to see the number off people who have visited the page. This is the number of people who have downloaded the book. So I've got a 70% I guess conversion rate here. When you click on this, this is what's readers see. So when a reader clicks this link, this is this is what's, um what they see here. Ah, and all you have to do is, you know, click this information to set this link up. All you want to do is just hits add a download page. So this will sort of walk you through everything. So which book do you want to create a new download page for? Let's say I want to create one for this summer of crowd and this asks, Do you want book funnel to collect their readers email address before they can download the book? This is that same feature. That's instead, freebie has. So I don't have the ability to collect readers email addresses with the plan that I have. So I would just check. No, just let them download the book, right? And so you can create a download page name. Say you want this is gonna be the copy that you put all of your email campaigns on Male chimp. If you want to just write that, you can mail chimp e mails, you know? So this way you can keep track off where those downloads are coming from. If you're making multiple download links, you can set this toe expire at a certain date or a certain download limits, and there are different layouts that you can do. They've got some pretty good looking page layouts. So, like this, you know, the layout of this page. This this looks pretty good compared to what it looked like when the website your at least when I first started using the website, you can change the color scheme of it. You could change the accident color include three D effects for the book cover. As you see, this has got a three d effect on it. And I have added a heading here, uh, again that Kirkus review the page title. I just put this as download The Summer of Crowd. This doesn't show up on the page anywhere, but is the title in the Web browser? Okay, so this secret says here heading to get your free copy of the Summer of Crowd. That's this right here. So you can change that up, however you'd like. And then the button text you can change if you want a toe changes you. Can I just put get my book? That's what What it says right here. I just feel like that. Get my free book or download free book. It just seems very I don't know. It just seems very in your face. I just like to be a little more subtle with this stuff. I mean, I didn't clean it included here because I didn't want people to know the book is free. But the 30 seeing here I just figured it's kind of overkill. Toe haven't put it there, too. You can use the book description on the page if you'd like to. And there are some advanced settings here. I have not ever used these. I don't really know what what these are, but once you've done that, just save the download page. I'm gonna cancel it because I don't want to save the download page. But again, once you've got your download link, you can just copy and paste it. And then this is what it looks like when people click on that and as you see even registers when you do that, when you click on it. So this was at 40 when I clicked on it myself. Just went to 41 this went from 70% to 68%. Okay, so So that's that's how you credit download page giveaways. Page this. This is one that will they will collect email addresses for again. I don't have this service on my plan. If you do, you can add a giveaway here by clicking this. There's also a feature on book funnel called Bundles. Now, this is something I didn't even know about until I started making this class and I did some research into it myself. So the way that these book bundles work is that you can you can add your book in with a group of other authors. Just like the giveaways are similar to the giveaways on insta freebie, where people can can see these bundles and then choose to download your book. So it's just that it's a good way for you to get your book out in front of more potential readers rather than just kind of going it alone. You know, when you're with a bunch of other authors, they can promote the bundles of people on their mailing lists. You can promote it to people on your mailing list, and there's a chance that more people are going to see your download link, so there's a chance that you're going to get more people to join your mailing list. So the way to do that well, if you want to learn more about it, you can click this link, and it does give more information about that, including ah, sample page. This is what a sample page would look like. Okay, so these are old books that are on on that campaign in this bundle. Say, you like Frankenstein. Just click the title and then get your free book. Another thing that I did not mention yet about Book Funnel and why I used book for all in the first place is that, um it makes it really, really easy for readers that gets the book on their devices. It's the freebie is not. This is a freebie is not as easy. Book funnel literally walks readers through the process of how to get the book onto their device or onto their computer. So people on insta freebie they may, they may not be able to download the book, or they may have some some trouble with it. So what I do in the first auto sequence for people who come to my mailing list through into the freebie is I give them a link to the book from book funnels. This way, anybody that had problems downloading the book can download it on book funnel. That's why I use both. You know, that's why I haven't upgraded to use integration on book funnel because I used book funnels simply as a means to just give away copies off my book. I'm not used to get to gain new subscribers. That's what I have instant free before. All right, So again. But this this bundle feature, it seems really great. I haven't used it. I may look into it. You know, it looks like it's something that will help me toe get mawr visibility for my books on this website. Here's the pricing. So this is one where you can pay by year or by month. So for a first time off there, you paid $20 a year. You could have one pen name and 500 downloads per month, and you could store five books the midlist off their here. You could have you pay $100 a year or $10 a month, and you could have two pen names. You can get up to 5000 downloads per month on limited books. You can collect email addresses, secure air sea delivery and integration with their mailing list, and then for the other, the biggest plan. That bestseller plan, you know, you could just get more stuff with that. So my plan isn't actually on here because I got on book funnel before they created this new pricing plan and before they started doing integration. And so I end up paying $50 per month just to give away are not not sorry, not 50 per month, 50 per year just to give away up to 2500 copies of my book. If I start giving away more than that, then I will consider updating or upgrading to a new plan. But as you saw, I only gave away 38 copies of my book in February so far, and we're like, you know, three weeks in, So I doubt that I'm going to need to upgrade anytime soon. All right, so some tips on these sites you can use book funnel in male chimp. All right, so just like I said, I I put links from book funnel in my auto sequence emails. So this way it walks my subscribers through the the process for how to get their books onto their devices. And I've never had anybody complain about that. In fact, a lot of people have told me how easy it is ends. Make sure to share your links on social media. You can boost the post on Facebook about your book being on insta freebie or book funnel. You can pin your link on your Facebook page so it shows up first on your feed, and I'm gonna show you how to do that. That that's what I have done with with one of my books, you know, shared on Twitter. Shared on, um, whatever else linked in it's so you know, you could run Facebook ads with your links or boosted posts. What's great about this again is that you could monitor your data so I would do that. Just just look in there every once in a while and see how your books are doing with their stats, just to see if there's if you see any spikes, find out why that book might have stunned so much better on that day. You know, the more data you have, the better okay. And another thing that you could do is to put a link for the first chapter of your devil on your website. Now that being a link from insta freebie or book funnel, what I mean by that is So here's my website. Go to books this summer of crowd. What I have done is put this says, download the 1st 2 chapters of the Summer of Crowd Click Download. Now, this is just the download feature like this itself. This is something that I was able to do on WordPress. I've got a download which it You don't need one of these. You could just put a link. You know, you could just put, like, download. The 1st 2 chapters is the summer of crunch and then hyper link to it, you know, But this it shows up here on this is my book funnel page for that. So it's just a sample of the book, the 1st 2 chapters. And as you see, 48 people have already downloaded it. So it is. It is something that people are using, and it's I think it's a a nice little thing toe add to your website because it helps to get readers more interested in your work. Okay. All right, so that's it for is the freebie end book funnel again? This is good good websites to to use if you have got the money for them if you don't have the money for him. You did see that there's a free feature on insta freebie. But this could just be maybe a goal. Once. Once you start making millions for your books, you can you can get on there. Okay? It just makes life easier using those websites, one or both of them. All right, So up next, we're gonna be talking about male chimp. This is gonna be another great one. I think you know of all that. The difference strategies for marketing books. Creating a mailing list is probably the number one. Marketing strategies may be the most effective way of getting new readers keeping readers in, keeping current readers entertained. Keep giving them more information about you. So building your mailing list, it's like, basically, you're just you're creating a new audience for yourself. So we're gonna talk about how to build that audience, how to manage that audience and how to set it up on autopilot. So you don't even have to do anything. All you have to do is just sit back and let the system send out emails for you. All right, so we're gonna do that next Please check this one out. You're not gonna regret it, Male Chip. All right, So we'll see you next time Until then. Have a great day. 30. An Introduction to Mailing Lists/MailChimp, and Why These are Critical for Sales: right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Lymphoma. And today we're gonna talk about male chimp. This is a really exciting topic, and I hope that you're as excited as I am about this. All right, So what is male? Chimp? Male chimp is a website where you can collect email addresses and send subscribers e mails . So it's basically instead of, you know, sending individual emails to people in Gmail or Yahoo. Uh, you can have multiple people on lists in male chimp, and you can send e mails toe all of those people at once. You can also create landing pages where subscribers can input their information and then automatically get added onto lists in your mail chip account. You can also create auto sequences. Now this they take a little bit of time to set up. But these make your life really easy. Basically, what happens is with these is that subscribers come through a list of yours and mail chimp and then mail chimp automatically sends out a series of emails to that new subscriber that they're extremely helpful. I've got several auto sequence is set up and they just make sending emails such a breeze. All right, Male chip is free for the 1st 2000 subscribers. But no, you don't have access to auto sequences with this option and shaken Onley. Send a limited number of emails each month, and it costs $10 per month for the 1st 500 subscribers. If you wanna have unlimited emails on and if you want to be able to use auto sequences and it's $15 per month for 501 to 1000 subscribers, and the price just goes up from there, you know you could have millions of subscribers, but you're going to be paying a ton of money for alright and just want to be clear, too, that I am discussing mail chimp in this lecture series because I use milk chimp. But there are many other services you can use, like a Weber or Mailer lights. A lot of people use Mailer light. Uh, I've heard that it's cheaper, and it's it's very easy to use, but the basics are going to apply to all of these. You know, The basic idea is that you want to get new subscribers onto your lists, and you want to be able to send them e mails automatically and efficiently. So why are mailing lists important? They're important because you own your lists. All right. Now, let's say you spend months building up your Facebook page or an instagram page or whatever . Now, maybe you've got 20,000 followers and they're all engaged and they love you. But then what happens one day when Facebook decides to close your account? You know you've just lost all of your your faithful's subscribers faithful people who are following you. But you are at the mercy of Facebook. You're at the mercy of Instagram. You're at the mercy of whoever with a mailing list. However, you are in control of your subscribers, so that is really important, and it makes things more personal or less. Sales E. Basically, these are people who have opted in to be on your list. These are people who have said that they want to be on your list, so when you're sending them emails, it's a far more personal interaction than if you're just posting, are making ads on Facebook or making ads on book bub. These air people who want to get information from you and you can make it more personalized to them. You know, you couldn't. You can, depending on how they came to your list, you can personalize that information for them, and you could also be more personal about yourself. You can give more information about yourself, whatever you're comfortable with giving. Recently, I sent out a campaign to my subscribers, letting them know about a trip that I'd taken to Brazil, and I gave some pictures as well, and I gave them information about some projects that I, um, had thought up while I was in Brazil. So, you know, it doesn't necessarily all have to be about sales. This could just be you giving them information about yourself, All right, so that's why I think it's It's a more personal thing. It's less sales, and you may have more success selling to people. As a result of that, you can also gather relevant data. This is really important because you can see who is opening the emails. You can see who's clicking on emails. You can see at what time of day people are clicking on your emails. You can see which you know which emails people are opening. Basing based on that subject line that you use. There is so much great information that you can gain from a service like male chip. All right, so we're gonna skip the tips for right now. I've got some great tips coming up for you in the upcoming left Lectures and what we're going to be discussing next is how to create a list on male chimp and then also how to create a landing page. And so once you create a list, you want to get people onto that list, and that's what you're going to do with the landing page. And then I'm gonna show you where you can put your landing pages to attract new subscribers to your lists. This is really important stuff, So please make sure you check this video out, and I hope 31. How to Build a List and Landing Page in MailChimp: I will come back to from first drafted bestseller I'm John Le Poma. And today we're going to be discussing how to create a list on male chimp and also how to create a landing page and what to do with that landing page once you have created it. All right, so I'm gonna just explain this and then I'm gonna show you how to actually set this stuff up. But to create a list, you want to organize your lists based on where people subscribed. So I have got a number of different lists, and it's all based on how those people came to the to my mail chip accounts and I send them Auto sequence is based on where they came from. You can also create landing pages for lists. Landing pages are just Web pages where people can fill in information and sign up for your mailing list, and I'm gonna show you how to do that as well. We can create artist sequences for the lists, and again, I'm using mail Chimp. You can use Miller Lite or a Weber, or whichever one you prefer. I would I'd like mail chimp. There's there's so many features with this and integrates with with a lot of the the different services like insta freebie and book funnel. It's just it's one of those standards one of the biggest, if not the biggest, service out there for mailing lists. So here, I mean, I'm in male chimp mail. Chimp is just w w w dot mail chimp dot com So go there. You're gonna have to creating accounts. Once you've created an account, you're going to come to your your home page here. So it's welcoming welcoming me back so here can get some information about your account overall. Recently, I sent out a campaign, and so I had I have a negative seven audience changed in the last week, so I had 10 people unsubscribe or bounce for emails bounced when they were sent out. And so now I have 685 total subscribers. As you see, last week I had 692 and that it was going up, and then it started to go down because I sent out an email on February 20th letting people know about my new book. And so, you know, I have 685 subscribers. Still, after that, I wasn't a huge, huge hit there, so and whenever you send out a big campaign, you're likely going to get people to unsubscribe. The idea is that you don't want to have huge numbers of UN subscribers. You want to keep that number pretty low. But don't feel bad when people unsubscribe because they absolutely will. You don't think about yourself. You've probably sign up for listed of unsubscribed and whatever reason why you did that. That's probably why people are un subscribing from your list. All right, so I'm going to start here with lists because that's where everything pretty much comes from. Um, so, as you see, I've got several lists here. It and I have labeled these lists based on where the people have come from and which book they have downloaded. So, as you see here, this is developing minds Bonus chapter, front matter. So I put a link in the front matter off my book, the E book Developing Minds, and I've had one person subscribes to my list through that I puts a bonus chapter on my website for developing minds, and 10 people have clicked on that link and signed up that way. This is one of the biggest ones that I've, um, that I have. This is my biggest list. It's not one of the biggest. It is my biggest so developing minds instead, Freebie. These are the people that downloaded developing minds on insta freebie and and so on here, so and as you see, it gives you stats. So 53.6% of people on this list are opening emails. 16.1% are clicking on those emails. So this is That's a pretty Those are pretty good numbers. These, you know, these air. The clicks are good. This definitely want to get that up. So But as I've said overall, the open and click rates are going down across the board for a lot of authors. Just because of email list fatigue, people are readers air getting e mailed by so many authors now that a lot of these readers are either ignoring the emails there unsubscribe ing or they just get the free book and then they unsubscribe. So, you know, you really have to try to stand out once you get subscribers to your list. So it's important to be sending engaging emails, giving them information that they want That's pertinent to them and all that. All right, so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna create a list so hit create list, and then just click create list again. We're going to call this one first drafts. The bestseller six already got that in there. This is gonna be the email address that's people reply to our people. Will, when they reply to your emails, that's where those emails will go. You can change the u R L if you'd like to. All right, we're gonna write a short reminder of how these people came to the, uh, this list, and so I usually just copy what's down here. Okay, so this again, this is gonna be on the the bottom of every email that I send through this list, reminding people of why they joined that list and letting them know. Hey, I'm not just I'm not just spamming you. I didn't Just by your email address, you opted in on this list. All right, then you scroll down here and you're going to see that. You do have to provide it address here. So That's just that's consistent with spent can spam law. You do have to given address now. This is not my address. So anybody who's who's thinking of egging or toilet paper in my house If you go to this address, you're gonna be a A UPS store in Pacific Beach, California So, um, I opened up a UPS box because and then this is this is the address for my my company as well. L'm ANDRO ARTS. If you're not comfortable with putting your own home address here, you can open up a P o box at your local post office, and you can use a P O box instead. It's not, You know it's not the cheapest option, but it's It is cheaper than opening up a UPS box a zai have, but this I use this UPS box for my business address, all right, and so you can. You can give a phone number if you want Teoh. I wouldn't do that, and also you can enable double opt in. The reason why double opt in might be enticing is that it's it's It's an extra step of security, So when when subscribers subscribe to your list, they get sent an email asking them again if they want to opt into your list. So it's it's called Double Upton. I believe male Trip offers you a reduction in your monthly bill If you do this just because with that, it cuts down on the amount of spam that you may send out it. Also, it shows that you're not just adding anybody to your list. These are people who want to be on your list, so it's just an extra measure of security for you. And if you want to get notifications, say people join your list or they unsubscribed from your list are. So it gives you one by one, information out who subscribes and who unsubscribe. I just do a daily summary. All right, so let's click save. So now we have set up our list. First drafted bestseller. I don't have any contacts yet, so what I want to do is I want to get context. I want to get people onto this list so you can either click sign up forms and builds a list from here so you could do a general form hit select ends, and you can design this form if you'd like to see. This one is huge mess that this is all knew they didn't have this information on there before. This is this is how I learned or this is this is what I have used with a number of my lists . These forms don't always look that great. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna skip over this because male chimp recently created a much better mailing list. Page for your lists are mailing this page maker. So in order to do that, click on campaigns and then Creek Click Create Campaign. And then it says, What do you want to create? Quick created landing page. So landing page name. Let's just say first drafted bestseller. We're gonna check that list here. First draft. The best seller. I don't know. It sound there twice. All right, so we're making a slant. A page hit. Begin. Now we can create our own sign in page. So it's Let's add our logo here. Such hits at it. So we can We can add an image if we like to. So it's Let's see, I've got some images already saved in my account. Let's just let's just add this one. All right. This is one that I already have. All right, it is those pictures of me in Brazil, by the way. All right, so it's insert that's onto this page. So say we got this massive image now, so we might want it edit the size of it since its resize. See, it says 9 40 by 7 88 Let's just knock it down to, like, 400. I'm just I'm just totally making this up. I just want to make it smaller. This will automatically scale it for you. So hit, apply, and then save. And then we should go back to this here. So, yes, there is. It's smaller. That's that's a lot better. Okay, So big, enticing headline goes here. Um, your free down load is waiting. All right, so there we go. We're being an enticing and what we can do to us, but we change. Let's make this bold. That's that's, um, change the color here. And this is where you can, you know, your branding can can come into play if you use a certain kind of font certain color font. Use that here. All right, so let's let's change it toe. I don't know. Let's let's do, uh Let's do this one here. All right? So we changed our funds. We've just added some information here. And this space tell people what they get for signing up. So everybody kind of got that information up here. All right. And as you see already have this information on this graphic there. Um, so you know this. I just pulled this because it was one of the pictures that I had uploaded. You could put anything in here. You could put your book cover. You could put Facebook banner style image, you know? So be creative with this. And but with this page, just some. Just some tips here. When you're making this, make sure that's not too busy. Make sure that it's easily readable, you know. Got big, bold letters here. You don't want to write too much information because people will stop reading so and then also with a with a box like this Here, it shows you can add difference. Um ah. Fields here that are required. I would stick with email addresses and no more. The more of these you check, the fewer people who are going to actually sign up. You know, maybe you want to put a first name and don't require it so people can sign up without giving their first name. I don't know. I think it is helpful having a first name in that. You can personalize emails to people when you have their first name on file so that if that's something that you want to do, I would go with it. I wouldn't do anything like this. Don't ask for their address or phone number. They will think you're nuts. All right. And Sue Alyssa's button text here, Sign me up. Um, sends me my book. I don't know. I'm just making that up. So saving close. So see how it changed that. So here we go. And it is goodness if we can change the color. Yeah. So it may be good too, because this blue is similar to that said that blue you really white might want to consider making the button something that is, that stands out maybe, like an orange or red, something that people have their eyes air instantly drawn to You also don't wanna have a bunch of other links on here. You just want the one place for that people can click to be to send me my book link. You know you don't want them leaving your page. So those were just some tips here. All right, so I'm gonna click on this, Will save and close. And so once we have, ah, landing page we feel good about Let's just go to save and continue. Okay, so So now we have got this. We've got our content. We've got It's hooked up to our list. We don't have a recapture enabled for this. If you want to change that, you can in your list settings all right, and says that we're almost done. We just need to draft the landing page. This will appear in the titles draft to best. We're just making the You are all right now. Sorry. That's seller. Okay, So see how it made this girl. Let's click. Save Now we have got ourselves a landing page. It says it's ready to publish. Let's hits publish. All right. And now let's click that that page and look at that. We made this. We made that in about five minutes. Right? And this is just This was just me messing around really quickly. Take your time with this at a better image. You know, just this is just how you would do that. And so when people add their email addresses, let me just do I'll just do influence al men dro art's dot com We'll click. Send me my book. That address just instantly got added to the list here, so let's go toe lists. So now we have our landing page and we've got our list set up Now, we wanted to get some subscribers so we can take that link. This first draft, the best seller link. Let's take this bad boy. Copy it and let's let's add it to our the front matter of our book. Now you notice this is my This is my e book here The Kindle version off my book this summer of crowd. So this is the front matter here, off that book. This is the one that I made again using vellum here. I added this graphic to the beginning of this. So when people click on this, they are added to that list so you can use that link you can you can make ah graphic and it's the front matter of your book and vellum and then just add the hyperlink to that. All right, so I showed you how to do that in the formatting lecture. So go back and check that out if you if you still have questions about that. But here, I mean, people can click on this. This is what the old landing page looked like. But now they look a little bit better here. You know, this, this one, this one looks better. Also, one thing that a lot of authors are doing, um they're offering ah, free book or free short story something to get people to click this link here and then get that person to subscribe. So if you have written a Siri's, what you could do is perhaps give away the first book of that Siris for free on Amazon. You can make your book Perma free or just permanently free, and it is possible to do and then add a link to another free book. So at the second book in the series could be free so linked to that and then you're likely to get more people to subscribe. I didn't have a book to give away for free for this or a bonus chapter. But with my other books, I did give away bonus chapters in this section here. It's a little more general click here to get free short stories, songs, screenplays, blah, blah, blah. But if you have ah, link that says Click here to get a free copy of Understanding the Alec Ran Jonathan Love Poem, a second novel that would be a little more enticing for for subscribers or people to come to your list. All right, so keep that in mind. We're just We're just trying to build our lists with with the most engaged subscribers, right. And also, now you can set that up. You can link this to your website, see? So I've gotta sign up for bonus chapters and all that put this link all over the place. You know, any time somebody clicks it and as their email address, they're automatically going to go into your your list here. All right. In some tips, organize your lists based on how people subscribed. Now I have got three books and I give all three of those books away to people in exchange for their email addresses. Now, if I have given away one book and I received an email address for that, I want to make sure that I'm tailoring the emails that I send to that person based on the book that they they downloaded based on how they came to that list. And so this way. I know that if they downloaded, let's say, you know, developing minds and I want to sell them my other books, So maybe I'll give them a free bonus chapter are free first chapter of my other books, you know, So make sure to organize your lists based on how people subscribed to them. So this would you stay organized in your marketing efforts? Also, make sure to name your lists with easily identify with an easily identifiable system. Now for me, I went back and re named my lists because they there was no order to them. But what I'd started to do is to put the name of the book first. So, like GM or you way or some. And then I put a dash and that how the person came to that list so like insta freebie or noise trade or whatever and this helps me to to just easily see which which list is which, especially especially once you have, like 5 10 10 or more lists. It can get a little bit confusing, so make sure to have a system and make sure that it's easy for you to work with. Also, don't get too carried away with making lists. You don't need to keep breaking down lists and the subgroups and all that. You know, I'm just saying to organize them this way. You know how to best approach an email and contact those members. But you don't have Teoh break it down into such You know, such an organized system where your your you are creating segments for people in Sheboygan versus people in Albuquerque, you know, like just don't get too carried away with this. Also, make sure when you create your landing page that it is attractive that isn't it's enticing and that you're not putting any other links on that landing page. So this way, the only thing people can do is give you their email address and then sign up for your list . If they can click someplace else like your Facebook page or whatever they may click that link, and then they may never sign up for your page. So if you want to give them all that information, great, do it once. You've already got that person signed up to your list. But just give him that one option to sign up. So this way they can't click away from your landing page. Also, put your landing page links in the front matter of your book. Put him on your Web page, put him on social media, create Facebook ads. This is something else that you can do is create a Facebook ad, and this is something I have not done yet, which is why I'm not including it in this course. But if you give away our put your landing page on Facebook at, people can, then sign up for your list and get that free copy of your book. All right, so try to be creative with with where to put your landing pages and so that you are gonna be very effective with collecting people's email addresses and gaining new subscribers to your your mailing list. All right, so next we're going to discuss how to send your subscribers arto sequences on mailing on male chimp. But the basic idea is going to be the same for any mailing service that you use of using Convert kit or a Weber or middle light or whatever. You know, the idea is the same. You send people a list or a series of emails or maybe just one email, but they're set up automatically so that when users become or subscribe to your list, they automatically get these these emails. All right, so this is gonna be a really important lesson. Please make sure you check it out. 32. How to Build Auto Sequences in MailChimp and Sell on Autopilot: Hi. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John the Poma. And today we're going to discuss how to set up your auto sequences on male chimp. And I'll also explain how to set up a templates on male chimp so that this way, you can reuse the same templates over and over. When you create your your emails for subscribers, it and I'm also going to give you some tips on how to grow your mailing list. And I've already explained a little bit about all those sequences. But they're a Siris of e mails that are automatically sent at certain time intervals that you choose. They make your life really easy, and it takes some time to set up, but they can be duplicated. So once you get one set up, you can do plicating it and use it for us many lists as you'd like. All right. And so and you can create a template to when you're when you're making your auto sequences and your email campaigns. So I'm gonna show you how to do all that stuff now. OK, so now what we want to dio So we've created our our landing page. We created our list. We know where to put that that link. Let's create an auto sequence. Campaign four, our book are far our list. I'm sorry to see how we've clicked campaigns. So here we have our first draft of bestseller. This is the landing page that we just made. So what we want to do is let's create a campaign. We're gonna create an email. So we're gonna do an automated, uh, sequence because we're doing our auto sequence here. I would just go with welcome new subscribers and then campaign name. Let's just do again. First draft to best seller. We're gonna obviously pick that list. Click, begin. All right, so see this. This is an auto sequence section here. Page. So the way to set this up. Okay, so this it's saying trigger one. So this this is when this email is going to be sent to your subscriber. I always send it immediately so you can just click this. You can have the first email sense, you know, hours, days, weeks after a person signs up. But if you wait too long, people are going to forget that they signed up for your list and then when you finally send them that first email, they're going to unsubscribe or report you as spam. And you don't want that so you can trigger when subscribers are imported. So as soon as somebody joins your list, they're gonna immediately get this email. So let's just click. Update trigger. Okay, so now we want to create our email. So it's click this here. Design email. I remember this is gonna be auto sequence once. Let's just let's just name it that sequence. Number one email subjects welcome preview texts from Jonathan la Poma. Let's go. Next. I said, Now, this is where you can, um, use a saved templates. So I have got a template that if I have already saved and I can show you how to use this but how to make one of these I'm just gonna click this year. So this is my saved template. And then this is how you set up the email. Just click on a specific section main headline Do welcome. Then click here. All right. And then what you could let them know is that, uh, you're only gonna email them every so often they're not going to spam them you're not going to send their their email to anybody else. You're only gonna give them information. When you when you have something good to give them. Maybe when you have a new story to give them for free or when you've got new information to give to them. You know, you want to let them know important things about your your writing career. You know when you're starting a new book or when when you get a new book coming out. So let them know this this stuff also, if they came to this list from like insta freebie, you could include a link. If you're gonna do book formulas, well, use a book Funnel link Teoh to let the to let the reader know where they could download a copy if instant freebie didn't work for them this again. This this is Well, this is the first auto sequence. This is your your way of introducing yourself to your audience for the first time. If you want to let them know a little bit about you, go ahead. I wouldn't overwhelm them with the first email, and I would definitely give them something for free in the first email, whether it's a bonus chapter, whether it's a free download of a book I gave away done loads of my screenplays. I write music, too. So at some point, I'm gonna give away songs. Eso this is This is where you can surprise your reader. Give them a bonus. You know, this is this just lets them know that there, this trains them. And after the first email, they could expect big things from you and then also see how I've got here in my template. I've got my other books have got my social media links. We've got this at the bottom. This this page here, This is what it's just like a preview. So you can't actually type on this section here. You type over here. Now, let's just save and close this. You can also preview in test this email and to preview mode. You could take a look at what it looks like. I said, out of there, you can also test links. If you have any links in it, you could hit open link checker. And this you know this This is because there's a link to my book. Here. You can click that to see if this actually this link works. Sometimes you put a link in there and it doesn't link properly. So that's important. You can send yourself a test email if you want to see what it looks like there. All right And so. And you can also save this as a template. If you would like to. I already have this template safe. But if you want to set up on your first auto email, if you want to set that up as your template, you can do that. All right. So I'm just gonna click, save and continue. Okay, so now I've got email number one designs. I'm not gonna do any of this here. I'm not going to schedule any of it because we already have our trigger. Now, if you want to add a second email, click add email. Let's editor trigger. I generally waits two weeks for between emails. I don't want people toe have too many emails, but I also don't want them to feel completely forget about me. So I send about every two weeks and I have got 11 or 12 e mails depending on which sequence that I send out t readers. Now, if you would like to see my sequences, I am going to include a link at the bottom of this video where you can sign up for my mailing list and I will just immediately send you my entire sequence. So see what it is that I'm sending to you. All you have to do is just click the link below this this video and you can sign up for that mailing list and automatically get my my sequences. One thing I do want to show you as well. Here, let's just save it exit. Let's just go to campaigns. That's exit without starting. I'm gonna delete this year, so I'm gonna click on going and I'm gonna show you. See, my noise trades forever. So this is what my sequences look like here. So I've labeled them. You get you get information about open rates, click rates. How many subscribers that receive that email. So I'm gonna show you my readers teams. This is something that I I want to make sure I highlight here for you because this is another way of getting reviews. So you can do this as well. This is called my readers team. So I just wrote How would you like to read every one of my books for free before they've been published? Want Help me Choose it? Cover for a new release. If so, sign up to join my readers team, which is like a V I p Group who gets a lot of great free stuff and helps me a share. Word about my writing as a member of his team. You'll get all this stuff to be a member of this group. I'd only ask that you leave an honest review spread word about social media about launching my books. Share with me your honest feedback about my work. You know? So and then I've got this little link down here for them to sign up. All I did for this just creates is creates a another landing page. So? So the readers team is just a list on male chimp. And then I've just created a landing page. I made this one with opted. I'm sorry. Optimized press, which is a totally separate program from male chimp. You could use optimized press. I'm not gonna go over how to use optimize pressing this video. Siri's. But you can just make another list and another landing page and then just link. It's to your email here. So if readers want to join this team, they can click it and then add their email address and automatically be put in that list. And then you can create an auto sequence for that list, giving them review copies of your books giving them the links to the stores were you'd like them to leave reviews. So I've got this stuff all set up. It's all on autopilot. I'm sending people review copies of my books without you know, me, even having to lift a finger. I'm sitting out reminder emails to these people and letting them know abouts where to leave their reviews, you know. So this is This is it would be extremely difficult to keep track of all this stuff. This is why it's great. That's mail. Chimp does it for you, I said. That's what an auto sequence looks like. If you pause to add it thes, you have to you have to click. It doesn't say it here, so you have to click resume, so But I didn't do that. Something click next here. All rights So my Internets running pretty slowly here right now. Sorry about that. Okay, so let's just hit. Save it exit. Let's go to templates and thats click creates a template, and this is where you get to be creative again. So here are a bunch of layouts that you can use to make your template. I'm might recommend this one here. The 1 to 2 column this is this is similar to the one that I use. And the reason why is because you can add your covers on the right side here. So here you could just upload an image like I had in my email says here. Now it's time to design your email. This already is a text box here, so you can just leave this if you want to. This is just a place to add text text. This here is another text box, Stewart says. Text up here and information. All right, so and then we have got an image card here. So let's let's browse an image that we can add to this like, I'll just use this The This is the cover of one of my screenplays. All right, so now let's see We've got this background here. Let's get rid of all of that. So first, let's get rid of the caption under there that gets rid of that information. Go to style, scroll down, click, remove backgrounds and then click, save and exit. Also, if he wants, let's we might want toe at its this image just to make it smaller. So say 1 20 all right. And so I think that what they're doing Oh, I was going to say I think they have a standard sized now But I said, There we are. You can add a hyperlink to if you want a link to a page. All right, so saving exit. So now we've got our books cover on this side. We've got text boxes here right now. Let's say we want to add a social follow. Let's just grab this card here and drag. It's right under the book. All right, so this see how it's Cotts social follow so we can link to our Facebook page minus just Facebook. John le poma dot com. All right, so this is automatically then going to link to Facebook. Twitter. Same fig john le poma dot com Let's say you want to add your website? I'm gonna add John le poma dot com. All right, let's just hit saving close. Look, all this stuff is going to be linked then to your accounts. So now let's just get rid of some of this other stuff. We don't need content. Block. We've got Looks like we've got another one here. We've got a divider. Let's leave the divider in there. See this divider? It divides this information. We've got a text box. This is where we can write our emails. We added our book cover image. This is this is a little small. I would make this bigger, then just hit, save and exit. And then you could just reuse that whenever you're making an email campaign. Okay, so all this stuff again, it takes some time to set up. It takes time to set up your lists. It takes time to set up your landing pages. It takes time to add your landing pages to the front matter of your book and your website. It takes time to set up your auto sequences. Times takes time to set up your templates. But once you have done this, it's going to be automatic and you are just going to start. You're just going to start getting subscribers all the time without having to do anything. And these people, if you if you write engaging emails, these people will be engaged with you, they will follow you. They will buy your books. I get emails from people all the time. I just got one from Ah subscriber. Yesterday she was telling me that she's looking forward to reading and reviewing my book. So this is just a way again for you to control your audience for you. Toe advertise for you, toe. Let your audience get to know you better. Your readers get to know you better for you to interact with your readers. This is just extremely important stuff You're definitely definitely going to want to do. All right, so So we already did. This created templates and your books cover social media. Growing your mailing lists, we talked about this. You can add the book Perma free on Amazon. The way to do this is to go to tell about a lower price. So if you want to make your book permanently free on Amazon, what you have to do is set it free on a site like Kobo or iBooks and then come down to the section here, would says, Tell us about a lower price and then tell where you saw the price was lower. Let them know it was free, and Amazon will match that price, and they'll offer your book for free. So that's one way of growing. Your mailing list is giving away the first book in your Siris for free with a link for a free book to the second book in your Siri's. And then, if you write like 678 books, people are going to pay for those other books. You're not only going to make money, you're gonna get email. This subscribers and Andrew links to your websites. You can will grow your mailing list through into the freebie and book funnel email list swaps, which we'll talk about next. All right, so we got some tips here. Don't annoy your subscribers. Same thing with, like your have been telling you before about just being annoying, obnoxious. Don't just keep hitting them with. Bye now. Bye now. Bye. Now. What I did is I gave away a ton of stuff to them. So this way, when it comes to a new book that I'm that's for sale. I'm not like just It's not like the 100th time they've seen me say hey, by my book, you know? So I wanted to be special when when I ask them to buy something that they actually want to do that, you know, So create a relationship with these people that don't don't just see them as as money that that can be made also give them entertaining and relevant information. Don't give their email s email addresses to anyone else. All right, so I know that was a lot of information. It's probably gonna take sometimes that that just it all and but believe me, this is extremely useful. A lot of authors who have made a lot of money, they swear by their mailing lists. Uh, there's a book by a man named Tin Groll that's called your 1st 1000 copies. And it's all about the importance of mailing lists, you know, So just treated street the mailing list with respect, and you know it will. Hopefully, success will come to you next. We're gonna talk about email list swaps, which is another way for you to grow subscribers to your list. So I hope that you you check that splits her out, and we'll see against 33. How to Grow your Mailing List with Email List Swaps: all right and welcome back to from first drafted bestseller I'm John Le Poma, and today we're going to discuss email list swaps. So I'll tell you what Those are here. What our email list swaps. They're similar to bundles on Book Funnel and Group Give Away Our In group giveaways. I'm sorry on insta freebie here. Authors, writing in similar genres and with similar sized mailing lists to other authors, will tell their email subscribers about the other authors work, and those authors will repay the favor. So I know that's really wordy wordy there. The idea here is that you just get together with a bunch of people in your genre, and let's say you got three people in that group. You sends your subscribers information about the other two author's books, and and then what they'll do is they'll repay the favor for you. They will let their reading lists are there. Subscribers know about you, so this way it's like you're tripling your your reach with your mail list so you can grow a lot of new subscribers this way, too, especially if you're giving those other authors insta, freebie or book funnel links, where readers can click that link and then give their email address in exchange for downloading your book so you can you can. You can make a huge jump in your mailing list. I know authors who have added thousands of subscribers to their lists doing this, so that's that's the good news. The thing, though, about doing that. Just some caution is that your your price for your for your mail chimp er, a Weber or whatever is going to go up a lot if you're adding a ton of new subscribers. And also those new subscribers might not be the most engaged people because, you know it's possible that they were just looking for a free book. So you're gonna have to stay updated with with that list if you're sewing there. If you're saying that there are a lot of people who are not engaged with your emails, consider cutting or un subscribing some people from your list just to keep your mailing list healthy. You don't want us. You don't want t consistently send out e mails that 5% of people are opening because that may that may start to cause your emails to go directly to the spam folder and people's email inboxes. So if you're getting huge numbers of subscribers, make sure that you're whistling that number down to the people who really are engaged. It's just, ah, word of caution. If you're gonna be doing stuff like email list swaps, you could sell a lot more books because you you're going to be getting your books in front of the eyes of new readers. Here's why. I don't do email swamps. I feel like there to sales E. You know, I I just feel bad selling to my list. You know, I try to do that seldom. So this way, when I do actually say, Hey, by now, people will be a little bit more engaged. I'm on some other authors e mailing lists. And when I when I do see those emails, it just it makes me cringe a little bit. Now that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. Is just my own personal opinion on the matter again, A lot of authors are doing this. A lot of authors are selling books by doing this there, there, adding engage subscribers to their mailing list. So don't let the opinion of one curmudgeonly online instructor stop you from doing something great's to boost your sales. You know, just do your own thing. This is just why I don't do it. I also won't recommend something I haven't read my to be read piles huge. So I'm just not really interested in adding more books through that, just for the sole purpose of finding people toe that I would recommend to my list. All right, where do you find authors to do email swaps so you could find them again on instant free or instant freebie and book funnel or find them on Facebook groups? This is probably like the number one way of doing that. So get on Facebook. Just just get involved in the community. Ask people you know where they have are any. If anybody has done, email is swept. And if they have find out what groups that there are part of where they can get more information about that Google searches. I just Googled email list swaps in this website popped right up. So here you could just add your information and these people will connect you with other authors. You know, there's there's even a little video here. So So email this swaps tips again. Follow all rules if you are, um, if you're if you're doing an email, this swap with other authors and everybody is going to send out an email on Tuesday, the 17th with the other authors information and the other authors send out the email. But you don't. You have just cheated those authors, you know they're scratching your back, but you're not scratching their. So you do that enough times and nobody is going to want to scratch your back anymore. So just follow the rules, do what's what the rest of the group is is doing, and you should be OK, make sure your email you email your subscribers about the other authors. So I just said that so again, don't spam anyone I At this point, I think I'm gonna stop saying this going forward because I've hammered this point home, Um, a couple times now. So up next, we're gonna discuss setting up a Facebook off their page, and this is something that's really important. If you want to run Facebook ads or boost posts to great way to connect with readers, ands builds your readership, so we're gonna show you how to do that next, stick around overhead 34. How to Create an Engaging Facebook Author Page: all right. And welcome back to from first draft, the best seller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be talking about how to set up your Facebook author page. Okay, so to set up your page, you're gonna want to click create page shoes, artist band or public figure. Choose author and your name at pictures, bio events, things like that. And you're gonna need this page If you want to run ads or boost posts. Let's show you what that looks like here. Okay, so this is my page here. So I've got my picture here. I've got a Facebook banner and you can add those by clicking this and then clicking this toe. Add that That information. This has guts. Some pictures. This is me at the Oaxaca Film Festival. Here's me at a book events in San Diego with another author. Okay, so this I think I told you earlier that I had a pinned post on my my Facebook page. This just means this post will stay at the top regardless of what I add to this. OK, so and this is just that it's the freebie link for a free book. All right, I've got all of this information here on the side of my page. You know, it's got my name, my category, and you can add information here in the about section, you can add photos. You can puts events. I've got a mail link link, air mail, chimp link. Here. You can add videos. I'm gonna show you how to toe. Add this good reads widget here in a little bit, but there's a whole bunch of things that you can add to this. All right, so this set up your page, just click this little upside down triangle, Go to create page, go to artist band or public figure. Choose the category you are and author. Add your name, then click Get started, and it's It's that easy. All right? And so then you'll have a page. Just make sure to add information, and all right, I'm gonna show you how to add this. Good reads widget here too. So just go back to good reads. Go to your author dashboard by clicking this here and scroll to the bottom. There's gonna be a link down here for you to check to add your good reads tab to your Facebook page. All right, it'll walk you through how to do that, and that's that's pretty much it. And you'll get notifications here from time to time. Get check those out and you could see how many people are following you. I've got 681 likes, and only seven of those people have chosen toe unfollowed. Me and three people have reached my posts this week. All right, so that's how you set that up. Tips Use a professional head shot. Think of your branding to. So if if you use a perfect particular fonts or color scheme, add that to your Facebook page. Always be professional. And then I showed you had a link. The good reads page so you can just click. Add the good reads app in the Facebook page section. All right, Next we're gonna talk about design. There's a great website called Can va where you can make designs just like this one, and it's free. So I'm gonna show you how to do that. So stick around and we'll see you soon. 35. How to Create High-Quality, Free Designs using Canva: All right, Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're going to be discussing design, right, So you can create free designs using can va se websites where you can create add designs, Facebook banners, landing page images and much, much more. So you just choose the size of that. She would like to to the image you'd like to make. And then you could just do your design. You can upload images as well, So if you want to upload your books cover, you can use that in your designs, and you can download these to your computer. You can also use some of the graphics on Can VA but some of those do cost money. Now I'm gonna show you how to use this site here, So just go to ken va dot com that c a n v a dot com and you see here you can create designs . She can create a Facebook ad, a Facebook post wallpaper for a desktop, another Facebook ad option presentation. As you see there, different sizes down here. You can also create a custom dimension for an ad, which is great when doing book bub Ads. As you see some of my my designs here. I've got some book, bub ads, and I don't have a b testing with them. I found that this one is the most effective. So far, I've created sample design here that I can show you how to do. Here is just a terrible first idea for a logo for this course. I hired somebody on Fiverr to do the logo for this course, and that was a good decision. I made a Facebook banner here which didn't turn out too well, but these these are some of the ads that I've made. I've also created the graphics to put in the front matter off my E books to get people to click on those t join my mailing list. So and then here, these are just some of the things that I've made here. All right, so let's say that you want to make a ah Facebook post, so just click on that. All right, so here are some layouts. All right, So this blank space here, this is what we're going to use to make our design. Here are the difference. Things that were going to use to make this design. So here is a layout section, and you could, you know, if you like this, you can click and drag whatever of these on there that you'd like. I'm gonna hit, Undo here. Let's say what we want to do is we're gonna make an advertisement for or ah, Facebook Post about a kindle paperwhite giveaway that we're going to be doing. So all we have to do I've already searched Kindle. You could just type in Kindle and it'll bring these up now see how some of these say $1 some say free. So this one costs a dollar to use. But let's say we we like this one because I I use this on a post previously, and I like I like to this one. So we just dragged that onto this this little blank canvas and let's make this bigger because we want to get this to fill the whole screen, So let's make it make it even bigger. All right, so now this fills the entire white space here. And so let's say we want to add our book cover onto this kindle paperwhites image. So what we can do is we can go toe uploads and we can upload our books cover or any of this other any of the other images that we like. And we can put that onto this kindle paperwhite. Now, let's say we want to put my cover understanding the Alec ran on there, so just make it a little bit smaller. We come up here, see this? This little, this little thing here, you can click this and change the the layout. Here. You can change this for your book cover. Now we want to do is we want to make this a little bit smaller, right? And then we could just reposition it. And let's just let's just change the the layout here against we made it just a little bit. All right, so we got everything lining up here. Now, let's see. There's a little bit of space in there that I want to get rid of. All right, so this that looks pretty good. Right? So we've got our our book cover on over this kindle paperwhite. We've got our coffee. We get our apple were happy campers. Let's say we want to add some text to this just to hit the text tab. I said They're a bunch of different fonts that that you can use. I'm just going to use the heading font here or the subheading front. So you've got subheading. Let's just say Kindle paper White, Give away. So see how this is kind of hard to read so we can. We can reposition this. We could highlight all of it. We can change the color so it might be good to do a lighter color. Let's just see if that works. Okay, so this is easier to read. Let's make it a little bit bigger. It's making 32 sides and let's say we want a a different fought Let's do Sunday. That looks fun, right? Kindle, paperwhite. Give away and we can change. The We can change the location of this fought by clicking, clicking there and then just moving it around. Do that down a little bit there. All right, so we got a Kindle paperwhite giveaway. Let's go back to our downloads. I've got this Amazon Kindle local that I've downloaded and uploaded to Can va and we can just put that down there. Rights. That's a somewhat professional looking add that I just made in about five minutes. And this, You know, I would just encourage you to use your creativity to make the kind of designs that you need for landing pages or for Facebook ads or for Facebook posts. Or, if you want to make a Facebook banner, whatever you want to do at some designed to your website, you could do that for cheap, for free or for very cheap on Can Va. So but this is just a very general rundown on how to use can va. You can save your images, and then you can also download them, and you can upload them to wherever you would like to. All right, so that's that's pretty much it. Use Canada. Use it wisely. Use it responsibly, people. All right, so here's some tips with Can Va make sure your design elements line up what I mean by that . See how we've got this funds and we've got this down here. What you can do is you can click and see how this it shows how it lines up there. Also, you may see these. See this? We have this this line that's showing how it's lining up with the Kindle paperwhite giveaway. So that can help you to line elements up to where you don't just have this way over here. And this is over here. This will help it toe look better and see how this there was a line from here to here to show those to match up. So use that to make sure you're elements line up. Also, get second opinions before posting. You might think something looked looks great, but some fresh pair of eyes might take a look at this and be like, Wow, this is a hot mess. Don't post that, you know, to get other people's opinions before putting it, putting it out into the world. Make the important information stand out. So here this is thinking this this white kind of Maybe it's it's not standing out as much as possible, but that's the first thing I see when I look at this image and then the cover here. I think that looks pretty good there, too. Be creative, and if you're not feeling very creative, you can always hire someone to do your designs on fiber, and you could find high quality designers to do work for you. You could check through the reviews for the different designers you can check through their work. So I would recommend doing that if you're feeling overwhelmed with making your own designs on canvas. All right, so next up is book, bub adds, So this is gonna be another really good one that you don't want to miss. So I hope that we'll see you soon, and until then, have a great day. 36. How to Create BookBub Ads and Use them to Target New Readers and Sell More Books: right. And welcome back to From First draft, the best seller I'm John Lymphoma. And today we're gonna talk about book bub ads now just to be clear. Book, bub. Ads and book, but promotions are two completely separate things Book, but promotions are promotions that you have to apply for. And book bub is very highly selective of who they accept to run promotions for what I mean by this. Is that, say you're running in a sale of your book. It's normally for 99 you're going to sell it for 99 cents. What book bubble do is they will promote that sail to their vast mailing list subscribers. And then, you know, typically you would make you you might sell thousands of books and make tons of money. Now, book bub ads are different than these, and that these are These are adds that appear at the bottom of the emails that go out to subscribers. And you can target specific subscribers with your ads, and you pay either per click or per impression for these ads, and you have to outbid other authors in order for your ads to show up. All right, I'm explain that a little bit more here in the lecture today, but just that to keep in minds. Book club ads in the pro Most are two totally different things. I'm gonna be explaining the promo. See, in a future lecture here too, Right? And so I'm gonna show you how to set up these ads Now. I do have, you know, I've got some information here that I'm going to go through, and then I'm gonna show you step by step, how to do it. All right. So the way to do this is scroll to the bottom of the page, Then click on the partners Overview. Click. Become a partner. Choose. I am an author. Create your accounts, sign into your partner accounts and add your books that this looks like the first step here . So to do this, go to www dot book bub dot com. Then scroll to the bottom of the page. Click partners overview. Then click become a partner, then click. I am an author. Then choose how you publish and then create your account. Are And then when you've signed into your accounts this year says isn't going to look like this because you don't yet have ads. What you want to do is click on this up here, go to manage books and see how I've got my books added. Here click add books and then just type the title of your book and then hit. Enter and then it will show up here and then you just click, add and then exactly sure where they get the information from. If it's from Bowker, if it's from wherever. All I know is that when you took the title in it shows up here and then click add. Okay, so then to actually run an ad, click home, then click creating ad. Choose your book, choose, build new, creative or upload existing creative. And again, I'm gonna explain all of this year enter a great hook. This is really important. All right, then. Shoes store links. Target your audience by author or book category. Choose an audience in the green and then choose your schedule budget in bid and name. Your adds something that you're that's going to help you to organize your ads. All right, so I know that's a lot of information. I'm gonna show you how to do this so I said go to home ads. I think if you just click adds up here, it will bring you to oh, no rights to go home. Then click creating ad and then what you want to do is enter your books name. So I have this book added already. So then you can just click on the title here, and it'll it will populate here. It'll show up here and see how the title shows up down here as well. You can either use book Bubs, ad creator, or you can upload existing add creative, which you could make on a website like Can Va. I've found that the ones that I've made on Can va do much better job in the ones that I've made on Book Club. But let's just show you just for an example, what it looks like, like the book. But adds look like all right, so your book cover will show up once you've chosen your book, then you want to add ad copy here. Now this is your hook. This is this is what's going to draw readers in and make them wants to buy your book again . This is not going to be a plot summary. You don't want to bug the reader down with a ton of words. This is just something flashy and quick that they will they will look at and will entice them toe. Want to click on your head? I've got some examples here. I made a whole bunch of different ads and I'll go through some of these and show you the different types of ads that you can run or the different type of types of hooks that you can use in your aunt's. All right, so see, here this is one where I just took a blurb from a reviewer. All right, so you can use blurbs for these ads, and I just It just says, like the perks of being a, well, farmers grinchy older brother. So I thought that would be good, because it gives a comparison of another book that's readers might enjoy. And it makes it easy for readers to picture what this book is about just by reading that I've also included down here undeniably addictive. You know, Kirkus reviews give it a good review. And then it was in the Burns and Noble press presents list. All right, So this is another example of a hook here. I put sometimes the worst pain comes from following your dreams. Now, this just doesn't tell us anything about the character. It doesn't tell us anything really about about the plot of the story. This is just taking, like a theme. You know, maybe following your dreams can hurt. And so it doesn't have to be plot summary. It doesn't have to have anything to do. What about a character and this and has done pretty well this this hook here again, you can choose some different blurbs. I chose three blurbs. This ad did not do as well. Is this one? Here's another one for this understanding. The Aellacredit. He escaped to Mexico, but he couldn't outrun his addictions. This has done fairly well this this this hook right there or he escaped to Mexico. But his addictions followed to try a couple of different versions of this. I've found that the the shorter one is actually doing better than this longer one. All right and four developing minds. I've got one here that says, as far removed from Dead Poets Society as you can get. Didn't that was a quote from a book reviewer. I found this one. This one was a little bit too long, people. I don't think that people are as willing to read as much information again. You want to make it quick and snappy. Let's see if it's another one. This one has done the best so far for me, for for developing minds like a rock n roll teacher Man by Frank McCourt's You know, very simple. It allows readers right away to picture what this book is about, and I targeted Frank McCourt's in an ad for this book, and it sold very well, and I've run through all of the subscribers now that's that's have had that are interested in Frank McCourt's. So this ad is pretty much exhausted. But I sold a lot of copies from this ad, and here's one down here to take a wild trip to Mexico. So, as you see, I've got a whole bunch of difference adds that I've used or hooks that I've used try different things, you know, just you just want to entice readers to want to take a deeper look into your story. This isn't the end all be all when they click on this, it's gonna take them to your Amazon page or your iBooks page, and then they're going to get more information about the book. They'll see editorial reviews. They'll read your blurb. They'll read that. Hey, maybe your book won an award. You know they'll see your your sales ranking. So this is just this is just to get them. This is just a flesh here. You want to be flashy. You want it to be enticing just to get him to click on it and Teoh toe, learn more information about you. All right. And then I know we already covered designing a previous lecture, but I did not show you how to create an ad like this. So what you can do is in order to get this by now or read now, box down here, just goto elements and then choose this little shaded rectangle here and just drag it onto your ad and then size it. All right, then you could do that like this and then see up here, you've got options for different colors. Just choose the color that you want and see how this white is the border around it make it the same. All right, then add a text box. See how we got a little bit of text here. Just put that down there, and you're gonna have to size it. So make its make its, you know, keep keep it inside of the size of this, and then double click on the text, and you're gonna want to make it much, much smaller. See how how that went down there. Then you could just put read now and then again, size this. And then if you want to change the fought, just go up here and you could do that. All right? But that's that's how you would make make the button here exit. So I'm gonna get rid of all of this. All right? And then for this, the way I made this, I just took an image from my website and I blew it up. See, See, we got a road here. If you want to create a three d image of your book, you can do that's using a program called Pick, slur and gimp. Or you could just hire somebody on five or to do it for, like, five bucks. It's It's pretty cheap. I made this one myself, and then I uploaded it here. You could do a flat cover, you know, it doesn't have to be a three d cover. I think the three D covers look a little bit better, though. All right. And so And then I added information, too, about the, you know, little review blurb down here. And then I added that it was a Barnes and Noble press presents selection, and then we get a reading out box down here. All right, So that's how I made this ad. I've got my hook. So you can either use this service that book club gives U s. So it's just type in. All right, So see how we've got this year. And if I do one extra character, it's telling me that it's too big, So just keep that in mind. You cannot put a lot of information in these, At least the ones that are generated by Book club. All right, See this button? Copy here. That's what's gonna show up here in this box. So if you just put read now so you can put whatever you'd like down there and try different things. You know you can do a B testing with these. What I mean by that is, if you're going to to see what is more effective, just change one thing about the add change This from read now toe by now or something, you know, and then to see, after a few days, which of the two is doing better. And then, if by now, works better used by now in the future with your ads, all right? Or you could just upload an existing ad like I have like I made on can va and then see here you've got click through links. Now, these are all of the stores with readers will be taken to when they click on your ad. So, as you see that there are already some that are automatically added here. So you've got Amazon, Canada, UK, US, Apple, US Kobo, Canada, kobo, UK, COBOL, us. However, this is missing quite a few of these stores. So, you know, Apple has got more than just the US store. So the way you can add more of these on give you a little trick. Here is just a copy of this. Come down here at a link paste and then see where it says, U s. You can change this If he changes the U. K it's will take you to the UK Apple Store. And so you can choose where to target United Kingdom at another link. So let's change this from us to Canada. See a all right. See how it says Apple Canada had another link and then see and do a you for Australia? Yes, I was wrong. What the UK here you get to put it G B for the UK All right, but see how I just added extra links and all you have to do is change the country code here . The same thing with kobo. So it's let's let's copy that will add another link. So let's paste it. And then let's see, we had kobo u S u K Canada. Let's do kobo Australia. Mr. A. You see how it pops up here? Kobo au. This is just one way that you can get your book into more of these stores. All right, so now what we want to do is we want to refine by either author or book category. This is gonna tell us who we are are targeting with our ads. This is one of the great services of these types of ads, as you can target a specific audience now, I'll give you some tips for this. If you refine it by an author, let's say you pick like I did before Frank McCourt's. So just type his name in. Click here and as you see down here, see how this is in the green. This is a defined search. It means there are. You will get fewer than 10,000 impressions. That's the maximum daily number of impressions, and it says, nice work It is. It's a defines target, which enables you to reach a substantial audience of readers who are more likely to engage with your ad. You don't want toe. You don't want to pick it off there. That's got such a huge audience that you're going to be competing with tons of other authors. You want to find somebody who's in the green here, who's got a pretty big audience and is somewhat popular but is not a huge name that you're gonna be competing with tons of other people for now. The way that these authors are determines that the number off subscribers are determined. Is that this right? So say Frank McCourt's Somebody Must Have Run book but promotions for Frank McCourt's Now anybody who clicked on that promotion they didn't even necessarily have toe by the book. They just had to have clicked on an ad in his promotion, his book book promotion and that person will show up as having been interested in Frank McCourt's. That's where this audience comes from. So anybody who has ever clicked on and add about Frank McCourt's they have been included in this audience, and you could refine this as well. Say, for example, Frank McCourt's does Saifi thriller romance. You can. You can further target your audience because maybe you're writing. You're writing cozy mysteries and he writes cozy mysteries as well, and you want to refine that audience. Now he doesn't write cozy mysteries, so this is all right. Well, I don't know how that still showed up there. It shouldn't have been refined unless he writes cozy mysteries that I don't know about and what you could do to which may sounds extraordinarily narcissistic. But if you have run book bub promotions before you can target yourself. I've run a couple of book book promotions and see this. I have got a defined audience. Anybody who clicked on my book book promotion, even if they didn't buy the book there included in this audience. And it might be a wise idea to even target yourself, because these are people who are interested in you. All right, so that's just something to keep in mind. It's not, you know, narcissism. It's it's you're trying to be specific here and find the perfect audience before your books . All right, Now we come down here to schedule in budget. So what you can do is you can either run the ad continuously starting now, or you can select the specific date range to run it and then come up with a budget. I have always just run my ads continuously, and I have used $5 as a budget that $505. All right, so they don't accept decimal, so just keep that in mind if you want to do it for five books, just put a five. If you try to put a decibel in, there is just gonna it's not going to register, all right, So this is This means that I'm going to spend up to $5 per day on my ad, even if it's performing very well. It's going to stop at that $5 limit. And then there are different types of bids. So bids these are it says, that enter your maximum bid. Note that a higher max lets you reach more readers, and you'll usually pay less than what you bid. So what I mean by bidding is that all of the other authors who are running these ads, you are competing with those authors for that limited space at the bottom of an email. And so you are when you're doing this. Cost per impression or cost per click is that you're trying to outbid other authors. So let's say we're going to set a cost per clicks. This is every time somebody clicks on your ad, you're gonna have to pay book but money. Let's say we set that to 50 cents. All right, so they say they average between 30 cents and 60 cents. That means that anybody who bid 30 cents I will have outbid that person. So if we get 100 authors that have been 30 cents, and I am the only one whose bid 50 I am going to pay 31 cents for that click. Now, if there's somebody who bids 49 cents and I've been 50 cents, I am going to pay all 50 cents for that click. And so keep in mind, just because somebody's clicking on the link does not mean they're buying your book. You might get 20 klicks per purchase, so keep that in mind. If you're paying 50 cents per click and it's taking 20 clicks to get one purchase, you know that's going to cost you $10 to get that that purchase. So this is where you have Teoh think about you know, your budget. You have to think about how much money you have to run these ads. You have to monitor them to see how successful their doing. Otherwise, you might just be throwing away money. All right. You could also choose to pay by impression impressions. These parents these aren't clicks. This is just how many people have actually seen your ad. They don't have to click on it. They just any time somebody sees your ad this that is an impression. So, as you see, you can bid between 6 to $11 per 1000 impressions. I have recently done nine, and that has been a pretty good price. And I'm getting I'm getting a lot of impressions. Also is just one thing to to keep in mind is that book, but will only show it this add to its subscribers a maximum of four times. All right, So if if you're not gonna be sending this, if you're paying by impression, you're not going to be paying money for the same subscribers to see this over and over there only gonna see it a maximum number of four times and then they won't see your ad anymore. So if people aren't clicking, book pub is going to send it. Move, move the add on to another subscriber. All right, so when I name my ads, I'll pick the book that I'm using. I'll pick whether I'm using a and add that I've made on the book bub generator their ad generator or whether I'm using my own. And so I used the book book this time. So all right, book, bub. And then perks because that's the perks of being a wallflower quote. I'll put in the name of the person that I targeted in this case. I targeted myself. And this is a CPM ad at $9. All right, so this this just helps me to organize all of that information. You don't have to do it like this, but that's what I do. OK, on, then. Click. Continue. It's gonna take a minutes for this toe load. So don't worry, your computers not will likely not running slowly. All right, here we are. So VCR adhere. This was one that could generated with book, bub, or that we made with Book Club. This is not one that I had uploaded myself here, all the stores. And then here's who we're targeting the daily budget. Basically all your information. And then you'd have to click. I have read and agree to book Bub adds policies and then click create at I'm not gonna click this because I don't want to run this ad, but I will show you what the ads look like with the that monitor. Um, section looks like let's go back to the power point here for a second, all right? And So we're gonna show you. I'm going to show you how to monitor ads next. So you want to make sure you check your ad data and you can turn off adds to certain stores . So again, I'm gonna show you how to do all this. I'm just gonna run through, and then we'll go back to book club, try a B testing and keep refining your ad copy. Now, show you it. All this stuff means here. All right, so we're here. We're back in book, but this is These are my ads. So I have just as of today, I set up an ad cost per impression ad with summer of Crowd, and I I listed the the quote that I used or the hook that I used. I'm targeting Jack Kerouac, who surprisingly, doesn't have a very big audience on book, bub. And this is a $9 cost per impression. Add bid says you see nobody. That there are no impressions for this ad yet. I did do one for Nick Flynn, who is an author in a similar genre to to my books. And I did a cost per click or across print pressure one for understanding the Allah grant for $9 that one has. Overall, it's gotten 6907 impressions, with 103 clicks, with a 1.49% click rate. Now this might not seem like a very good percentage, but that kind of the rule of thumb is if you're getting about one well, generally it's like one click per 1000 impressions. I think I've noticed that book, Bob adds, seemed to do better for me. This has been a pretty, pretty good percentage there. You know, if if you're getting percentages of like 0.49% that's probably not a very effective ad, so you might consider archiving that ad. So if you archive it, it just you no longer have to pay for the ad. I need the ones they're ongoing. Anytime they generate either impressions or clicks, depending on which bid type you choose, you're going to have to pay money for those Those ads here. I've got one for that. I'm targeting Patti Smith. Help fans of Patti Smith. This is for the Summer of crowd. That's the ad that I chose. This is a cost per click one. As you see my naming strategy, I don't haven't kept it perfectly uniform here, But I know what this what? I'm looking at it. I see 50 and as it cost per click, add and see how this is 55%. I think I'm gonna kill this one, cause I've been this one's been going since 2 18 It's really not doing very much. So if you go to here, just click archive ad and that will I no longer have to pay for that. And this is the one that I was telling you about. The rock and roll one for Frank McCourt's this one. It only got one point 2% of people to click on it. However, notice this is this was pretty big. I got I got a lot of sales from Amazon for this ad, and as I was spending about 36 cents per click in Amazon us for this ad. Now, what you might find is that perhaps one of these stores is is not doing so well. One might be doing very well, but some might not be doing very well. What you could do is like see how we're not getting any clicks here really is. You could turn off the ads to those stores, and it will just focus on the ones that it's doing well in. Also, if you're finding that maybe this cost per click is too high for you. Say you're getting a lot of clicks, but nobody's buying the book. You can just you can slide that office. Well, all right. So I'm gonna turn these off here. So this is something you want to make sure that you're monitoring these daily, because there you could find that maybe you're getting a lot of traffic toe one location, and you're spending a lot of money for that. But you're not getting any sales. I found that for one of my ads in Cobo New Zealand's, which I don't have for this one. But here, See this. For some reason, I always get really high click rates clicks for New Zealand's. Yet I don't ever get any sales in New Zealand. So I've been turning those off because what's the purpose of wasting my money driving traffic to the New Zealand store? Look, I've spent 23 bucks and I've got no sales from that it's just a waste of money. So just be aware of that when you're monitoring your ads that you should be going in here daily or at least like every couple of days, just to make sure that your ads are doing what you want them to and also with the cost per impression ones. I'm finding that I'm using up all of my budget pretty much every day. And so if you are, if you're doing that and you've got a couple of ads running, let's say you know, you've got three of these and you're doing $5 limits. That's $15 per day. That can get out of control pretty quickly if you're working on a budget. So again, be very great. Very conscious of your ads. Monitor your ads. Don't just let these spiral out of control because you could just be pissing away money each month. And you know, this is this is something that can get pretty expensive. And if you're not getting any sales, then you want to kill these ads. I would I would wait a few days before killing Annette. It might take it might take a few days for it to start to become successful, and you don't want toe end it prematurely. But, you know, you also don't want to be a fool and just let this thing be sucking your money away for no reason. Okay, so let's do some tips here. Now, ask for input from others before running your head. Now, I had run my hooks and my ad creative by people in a Facebook group. And they had gave me some had given me some incredible feedback and that helped me to refine my ads and make them as as good as they could be. Because, you know, you don't want to be putting something up there that looks terrible, so running by some people first, be sure your vendor pages look their best. By that, I mean, like your Amazon or iBooks or kobo pages. If if you're getting a lot of clicks and then people are going to your vendor pages and they look like crap, then people aren't going to buy your book, so you might be getting a lot of clicks, but you're not getting a lot of sales. That that likely means that there's a problem with your page your Amazon page. Or maybe yours your book blurb. Or maybe maybe it's got a low rating or something, you know. So make sure your vendor pages are are at their peak and then use a system for naming ads like I showed you that will just help you to keep things organized, a B test. Everything all right? So maybe you've set up one ad that is, that is the same hook the same. You know, read now button. And you've just done one where you've made the ad yourself and one that's you used. Book Bubs. Add generator to make so in and see which one does better, you know, started on the same day. Do everything exactly the same cost per click. All that see which one is performing better than the other after a few days, and then keep that information in mind when creating new ads. And then, if you want to further refine it, maybe you want to refine it by changing instead of read. Now click by now for the button. See which of those does better do a reading out in the buy now button, and whichever one of those does better go with that in the future, you know? So just keep a B testing these until you have gotten some ads that are doing very well and brainstorm and research the best authors for you. I created a huge list of authors by just clicking on on the section here in book Bub, where your refining by author. I just typed a whole bunch of different authors. After brainstorming authors who write in my genre, I typed them into here to see if if they would generate a audience that was in the green, a lot of them didn't. And so you know. But you can just try this and then create a list of authors because once you have, once you've exhausted that audience, once you've used up that audience, the at is going to stop being effective like my Frank McCourt's ed. That did very well at the beginning for a few weeks. And then all of a sudden, you know, I there were no more people toe make impressions, and so that one just stopped being effective and then tried. Try the cost per impression and cost per click ads. At first I was just running cost per click ads because I thought it was crazy. Why would I pay for impressions? I want clicks, right. I want people to actually click on my ads. And if if they're not doing that, why am I going to pay for these impressions? Well, I've found that when I when I'm paying for clicks, you don't. Sometimes I don't get very many impressions, so I'm getting a good click percentage. I'm not getting a lot of people to see my ad, but with the cost per impression ads, you get a lot of people to see it. And you even if you get 100% of those people to click on it, you're only paying for the impression. So that is, I've started running the impression ads, and they're doing fairly well, although I'm using up my budget faster, but they I'm getting sales the ones that I'm running for understanding the eloquent. I have been getting consistent sales on Amazon in the last week or so. Another thing to consider is that when you get impressions, readers who you've targeted are seeing your book. They're becoming aware of your book. I mean, this is this is advertising in traditional forms of advertising. Before we have these advancements in technology like on book bub, where you can target ads or target all readers before publishers, they would take out ads in newspapers or or in magazines or on television, and they're not necessarily refining their audience. They're just trying to get that book out in front of as many eyes as possible. So with with impressions, people are seeing your book, maybe for the first time. And there's that rule of seven. It takes people seven times of seeing something before they buy. So it's it's good to get that book out there in front of readers eyes. So this way readers will know about your book, and they might potentially buy your book down the line because they've seen it so many times. So even if you're not getting clicks and you're running impressions, you are still informing people about your book and you're still it's You still might get sales down the line with that. All right, so they're just things that keep in minds and copy ads for quicker set up. What I mean by that is say, you want to run a B test on. And Ed, what you could do is just see what says copy ad. So you would copy everything about this ad and then So it's copied everything here. Let's say you want to just change one thing about this. Let's say we don't want to use an ad I've created. You wanna build a new creative using a book, bub Ad? You can just do that. So you've copied everything else. It's gonna be much easier now for you to run this ad. You know, you don't think toe type all the stuff in all over again. You can just copy that and then change the one thing that you want to change. And this helps with your A B testing and then archive or pause poor running ads. All right, Next, we're going to talk about Amazon ads and a lot of the same information that I just went over here with book bub ads is going to be pertinent for the Amazon ads. So just again. Keep in mind when you're running ads, you are getting readers to your your online vendor pages. So your books pages on Amazon iBooks and kobo ends and whatever. So this Is this a great strategy for gaining new readers and targeting specific readers? So I think that the Amazon ads and book, but beds there very powerful tools and they can be money sucks. All right. You can just waste a lot of money doing these, but you could also make a lot of money. It really depends on the amount of effort that you put into this. And so I hope that you check out the Amazon ads lecture next and hope to see you again. 37. How to Create Amazon Marketing Services Ads and Use them to Sell More Books: All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller, John La Poma. And today we're going to be discussing Amazon marketing Service ads. So this is going to be a long lecture, so I'm just gonna dive right into it, all right? And so just that give you a quick idea of what these are, by the way, just before we get started. So this is my page for understanding the Allah Gran. It says here there's an ad right here for this book. Gemini. I'm not gonna click on it, but this this is an Amazon ad. These are not adds these air. The also bots, these are These are books that people have also bought when they purchase my book and these air sponsored product ads. So these are two different types of ads, All right. And as you see, there are a number of ads here these air Amazon ads. So this is this is where your book will show up on the page and you can write a little blurb about to them a little hook. When people click on these, you pay Amazon money and you hope that the people will go to your page and then buy your book. All right, so that this is just Ah, quick, little run down. So you have an idea mentally of what these look like. All right, So how to set these up? You want to log into your KDP accounts, hover over the dot dot dots button and click promote and advertised, then under run an ad campaign click creates an ad campaign. Read the book adds acceptance policy. This is really important because they're pretty picky about's the covers and types of books that they will advertise choose either sponsored products or product display ads. So again, these these are the sponsored products and these air the product display ads. All right, so we're gonna talk, talk about which is better for you. But I'm gonna show you first how to actually set these up so you don't get lost. So again, we want to get going to our KDP accounts and then click on this right here, then go to promote and advertise. All right? And then run an ad campaign, okay? And this will bring us to the Amazon Marketing Services page. So you're gonna pick one of these two types again? Those sponsored products. Those are the ones that are showing up here, and then the product display ads are showing up here. Now I'll show you where they make shot show up as well, because I've got an ad that's that's running here to see how we've got sponsored ads at the bottom here. These were sponsored ads also show up. Okay, All right. So I'm gonna tell you the difference between these two. Find out which ones will be better for you. It's the sponsored product ads. These are ones that you target through keywords and the product display ads you target by author or genre sponsored products can be run continuously and product display ads. You select a date range for these. You choose a daily budget off greater than $1. And for the product display ads, the minimum you could spend is $100. The sponsor product ads usually start working quicker, and the product display ads can take weeks to start working if they ever start working. And what I mean by working is that you won't see impressions or clicks for you May might not see impressions or clicks for a long time. That's what I mean by working is seeing impressions and clicks. Okay, so now you still there's a difference between these. I'm gonna show you how to set up the product display ads. So you want it. Just click on product to display ads. Choose byproduct or by interest. If by interest, choose your genres. If byproduct, choose between target specific products and target related categories named the campaign Such a cost per click and budget. Choose your dates at a headline and text and then submit. So I'm gonna walk you through this process right now. OK, so we're going to start with the product display ads. So click on that and then it says, Select a book to advertise. I already selected the Summer of Crowd, but you can change that if you'd like to. If you've got multiple books and so says your targets your ad by product or by interest. So if you click byproduct, you could either target by specific products or related categories, and this is a new feature. I haven't used this yet, but if you target specific products, you can target other authors. So let's say I'm on the road. I want to target this book search. And so you see all the difference books that pop up for this. So you want to find ones that are relevant? Maybe a one out had Dharma bums or that c on the road? Well, that that that's, ah, films. That probably wouldn't be a very good one. This would be a good one here. Or you could look these up also by author. I just want to look up Jack Kerouac here. So you want to pick? You would want to pick options that are books you wouldn't want to pick like a shirt here. You know, what this means is that when you select these when people are on the page for this book, your ad might show up on that page, depending on your cost per click, OK? And then some other criteria that I not exactly sure about. All right. So just you could just go through an ad, Actually, was that was a video to so we can get rid of that. So just be aware of what it is you're selecting. This is a literary soundtrack, so I don't think that would be relevant. I just want to try to target people who might be interested in my books and pick as many of these as you can. I think you get up to 100 choices. So she was up to 100. You know this again. This is anybody who goes to any of these pages. Click. That's a film here to anybody who goes to these pages, they could potentially see your ad. And again, these are the ones that are showing up here. Okay, and I've heard that some people have have had great success with these ads. I haven't. I've done much better with the piece sponsored keyword ads, the sponsored product. That's all right, so you could do it this way. You could target by specific products or by related categories to. So if you want to check out specific categories, you can. So let's just let's say, you know, we were looking for literary fiction and genre fiction. You can add those because that's that's my books category. So if you want oh, you know, just just target people in your specific books genre. You can do that as well. I like the idea of targeting specific books, mainly because I write coming of age books. But I also write books that are more transgressive. These air books that are gritty, they are raw, They've got a lot of profanity. They've got sexual situations, and so coming of age doesn't necessarily cut it. I think for my books, you know, explaining what my books are. So if Aiken target books by authors who are similar to me, I think that's a better strategy for running my ads. You could also target your books by interest. So again you can. You can pick specific interests, goto literature and fiction. For me, at least, I would go to a literary fiction. But again, this is a really broad category, and there may be people who like clean literary fiction, you know, and and mine is just not that type. So I like to be a specific as possible, all right, and then when you're creating your campaign name, you could do the same thing as I did with my previous ads. So I just put some likes for summer of credit and we can put, you know, I have put like, just briefly, a couple of the different authors that I have looked up so maybe, like Kerouac and then just limited space here. So you don't want Teoh Add too many words here. But maybe like Hunter Thompson, you could just do like the initials and John Fontaine. Maybe. You know, if you know your own system, that would be, You know, you could you could name accordingly. And this is a product. I'm sorry, a product display so I wouldn't write the whole thing in, and then this would be ill duties at 50 50 cents. All right, so this tells me the book that I am advertising the people I targeted. It's a product display at, and I did 50 cents for my cost per click. And you could just do that by filling this in here. It does tell you the average bid is is this much in this range? So I would have outbid everybody else with this bid and again, the campaign budget minimum, you have to do at least $100. Once you put that in, then it will open up the rest of these settings here. And so the campaign settings you can run the campaign as quickly as possible during this duration. Do you have to pick a starting end date. Or you could spread the campaign evenly over its duration toe, where you won't just run the budget out as quickly as possible. It'll spread that budget out across this campaign, okay? And then you will create headlines for these and text. Now, this is gonna be similar to the hooks that I told you about in the previous lecture. But for, like, a headline, it says your headline is a subject line of your ad and attracts shoppers to click on your head. So there are policies and guidelines for this, and I'm gonna go over these, but you might want to write something like Will, will he ever find happiness? And it'll show you what it looks like here. Summer of credit? Well, it hasn't shown up yet. You can. You can click different options here. All right, so this is this is what it will look like in this size range there. And this is just a little thumbnail here, all right? And so when you type information here that will show up on this ad as well. So if we go back to this, you'll see I had written this for my ad copy. So I'm just gonna copy and paste this here. And you could write mawr in these ams ed thing you can for your book, bub. Ads. Alright, so I've got a headline. Will he ever find happiness? You don't want it. You just want Teoh, right? Something again. It's like a hook that's just intriguing. And we'll get people interested in your head. And then the text songwriter Danny Wolinsky thinks following his dreams will save his life . Will it actually destroy him? All right, So you could you can add a little bit more of these because you have more space. So I put songwriter Danny Wolinsky. So the reason why put Songwriter in there is because you know this this tells a little bit more about the book, and then things following his dreams will save his life. Will it actually destroy him? I also have one that says, instead of putting a question here, I put they're more likely to destroy him. And both those ads been running fairly well. All right, so this is what this ad will look like when it shows up on Kindle e readers. As you see down here. It's got the ad copy. It does not have the heading, though. For this size, it's just got the ad copy. It does not have the heading for this size. It just has the heading. So it's showing you the different types of ads that are going to show up for this specific add that you're making all right and still play around with the text. Play around with headlines. Do your A B testing play around with the interests or, you know, the authors that you use on. Then just submit the campaign for review. It could take a day or two for it to pass, and then once it does, then it'll start. Hopefully, it'll start showing up on Amazon. Your ads will start showing up in this section on Amazon, okay, And so this is this is somebody else's text here for their ad. You see that there's quite a bit and it gets cut off here. So keep that in mind is that you want to make sure that you're not getting your ad. You're writing so much that it's getting cut off. All right, so now we're going to discuss setting up sponsored product ads. So you want to click on sponsored product ads, get a name, budget and duration. Choose automatic or manual targeting for manual add keywords. And this is important. We're gonna I'm gonna show you how to do this. You could find K keywords using KDP Rocket and Google Edwards. Choose your cost per click, add custom text and then submit. All right, so let's go. Let's go back here. Choose a sponsor product at now, and I prefer doing these. Okay, so we've got our book again. Let's let's give it a name. Some, and then I don't know which which authors I'm gonna use here. I'll just I'll just do the same thing. JK h T j f for Jet Carraway Contra Thompson and John Font A. This is a sponsored products. I'm just gonna put I'm just gonna put sponsored. I'll make these 50 cents as well. All right, so the daily budget here, let's just set the five bucks, and then he could run the campaign continuously starting today or selected date range, if you'd like for that to end. All right. It's like the targeting type. You can do automatic targeting. This targets your ads to all relevant customers. Searches based on your product information. And it's not showing any any of that information here. So and I've never run these, so I don't know how well those do. And you could choose your cost per click. I always do 50 cents just because if it's too low, nobody's going to see it and this doesn't mean you're gonna pay 50 cents. It just means that that's your bid. If the next highest bid is 45 cents, you'll pay 46 cents for that click. Or you could do manual targeting. And this is what I do. They give you suggested keywords here. But when you look at these, sometimes they're just ridiculous. And they don't have anything really to do with your book, like, All right, So Norman Mailer, I don't know why that's in there. And so you can't choose some of these if you think their relevance. And I'm just gonna change these 2 50 cents because any of the ones that you adhere, then they'll show up his 50 cents. If you don't do this, you're gonna have to manually change each of those 20 from 25 cents to whatever you want. So let's just say I want coming of age fiction and visionary fiction. So we're gonna add these keywords. Summer is coming. Interesting. Um, let's see here, metaphysical the rest of these I mean, that's so broad coming. What? You know that that's that's that's not gonna help anything this. And just to be clear here, these keywords, these are keywords that when people you know, when they do searches on Amazon when they type these words into their search engines, this will cause your ad to show up in those for those searches. Okay, so or you can add your own keywords. This is what I highly recommend and the way you can do that, as you can use Google AdWords and a service called KDP Rocket to find your keywords. Now, what's great about AdWords is that it's free. So you have to creating AdWords accounts. And I've already created my Edwards accountant. I you know, I'm not able to do that again, but all you have to do is just go to Google AdWords and creating account. And then you're looking for the keyword planner. All right. Once you find the keyword planner type in some authors who are similar to you, and you'll get a whole bunch of keyword searches that come up now what? This is is this is any time that somebody had typed any of these these words into Google. Jack Kerouac showed up, you know? So these are the words that people are using to search for Jet Carraway. And as you see, there's quite a number of these here so you can download this, which I have done. And these are the keywords that's that I ran for Jack Kerouac. All right, so this is as you see, there's a bunch of options here. There are 535 and some of these, like the one that I just clicked on here. They're not gonna help you. Jack Kerouac backpack, you know, that's that's I don't even know what that that is. Maybe somebody created a backpack with jet care wets face on it. That's probably not gonna help you. I mean, if people are looking for backpacks, they're probably not going to buy your book when it shows up in that search. All right, So what I would do it is highlights all of these. So copy and paste. So command. See, and then go to book one. Right? So I've created this book and I've created a spreadsheet rather. And see how I've written Jack hair wack here. I've also written AdWords and KDP rocket. So what you could do for Edwards is just paste. Those adwords that we just got from AdWords right now is to get this huge list of these. Now, what we want to do is go to KDP Rocket. Now, this again, this is something that you have to pay for. AdWords is free. KDP rocket costs $97. That's a one time purchase. And again, if you're gonna be publishing a lot of books, this is something that I would just recommend buying because it's it's going to help you for purposes like this. Okay, so what I did is I just didn't ams keyword search for Jet Kerouac. And you see all these? These different options came up. Now, these are all words that people had typed into Amazon and jet care for Jack Kerouac. All right, so the other one is for Google. This is for Amazon. So these are gonna be more specific on Google. People might say, Like, you know, there might type in searches like Jack Kerouac's daughter. You know, our Jet Kerouac and alcoholism or Jet Kerouac, it And who knows, travel tips. You know, these air, these air things that people aren't necessary looking for books on Google, But on Amazon, they're very likely to be looking for books. So these keywords are probably going to be better than the keywords you get on. And words. Now, once you have done this, just click export. And I have already exported my list. It shows up like this in a spreadsheet. So what you could do is just again copy and paste these onto. That's that book here. So this is the KDP Rocket ones. Now, what I do is I do a mix of these, so I'm gonna paste these again, and I'm going to copy and paste these. See here. So I'm gonna put these together, all right? And then I'm just gonna highlight this column, So just click this click that this heading up here at the top, and it's gonna highlight everything. Then go to data table tools and remove duplicates. Now we want to remove Let's just click column D because we don't care about the other columns. Okay? The reason why we're doing that is because, look, there were nine duplicates. So maybe there were the same values of the same words that were written in this list as were on this once. We just got rid of those. So we don't want any duplicates here. And you'll notice, too, that some of these sometimes the names are spelled incorrectly. Keep in minds. People may spell jet care working correctly or the author they're looking for incorrectly Amazon. So I wouldn't necessarily just delete these people might when they might spell the author's name incorrectly. And your book will still show up eso next. What I would do is go through this and just get rid of any of these that don't relate. Like the English Patient that has nothing to do with my book or Jack Herrick poster or Wall Arts or vinyl. You know, his property forbidden. A lot of these aren't going to be relevant to you or your book. All right, so then once you have, once you have gone through ads, made sure you've got an accurate list just copy and paste everything again and then go back to then go back to Amazon ends. Well, let's change our bids here. 50 cents are and then paste these here and then we're gonna click. Add now you're gonna find that some of these might not add in that If it's too long, you're going to You can't use that. As is an option. You also can't import keywords that have the word kindle in it. As you'll see, you'll get this error message. It says conflict with reserve keyboards kindle. So Amazon has rules about this. Okay, so now we have got 638 keywords these air. This is a list that we've gone through. We've made sure that all of these are relevant. We can add up to 1000 keywords for our ad. So I would just do the same thing. Like, you know, maybe look up. Words 400 Thompson er look upwards for John Fonte or some other off there. So that's what we get up to. About 1000 Amazon recommends you get 1000 keywords per ed. And so again, what this means is that whenever somebody is looking up like, say, Agatha Christie. If their Aunt Agatha Christie's Amazon page, your book may show up in the sponsored products and section here. Also, just keep in mind here. This this is called the carousel. So you can scroll through this. The ads that are over here, these are adds that that are not the cost per click is lower. Or maybe they're not performing as well, Which is why they're not showing up on this first page. You want to make sure you get as close to the left as possible. So this ad is doing fairly well here. Okay. All right. So now we've got our words. Let's add our text. So I'm just going to copy and paste what I have here again, right? And so this is going to show you what this ad looks like. Songwriter Danny Wolinsky thinks following his dreams will save his life. Will this actually destroy him? All right. And so then all you have to do is submit your campaign for review, and as long as you're following all the guidelines, your ad will be good to go. All right? And so that's That's pretty much how you set these up. You know, it's and this is a lot of information, but once you have these up and running, just keep tweaking them. You don't finding out what works it on What? Dozens. Monitor your ads. All right, then, before we go any further, I would also like to show you that there are policies for your ads, and so this is really important. Make sure you're reviewing this because there are some things that they will not allow. They won't allow images of human or animal abuse on the covers of your books. They won't allow images glorifying or promoting the use of illicit drugs, drug paraphernalia or products to beat drug tests. They won't allow images or titles that are obscene, defamatory, rebellious, illegal, invasive, blah, blah, blah, you know, So make sure you're reading this because you're it's possible that your book will get denied for an ad and you don't want that. Okay, so and they will also give you samples of covers that's are acceptable in some that aren't so. They do have restrictions on guns and weapons, but if if your gun is pointed down and it's not like aimed at somebody, or if It's just somebody's got there. Just holding a going over here. That's OK, but guns cannot be pointed at a character directed out toward the customer handled by a minor. All right, so just keep these in mind. For whatever reason. This romance book, because of suggestive of sex, this was not okay, but a woman who is doing a, you know, a pose here for a fitness book. This is okay, this one, she's not wearing a shirt, so this one's not okay, but she's wear your shirts here. So this one is, you know, so just it just keep this in mind. And also keep in mind is that whoever is reviewing these, they are They're doing it subjectively, so one person might reject this cover. But if you submit the same ad again, the next person might accept it. So if it gets rejected, maybe just try, try it again. You know, just unless you know that your your ad is really sexually suggestive, it's possible that it will just keep getting rejected. I said this Check this out. This is really important. The book adds creative acceptance policies and just make sure that you're not in violation of any of their policies. All right, so monitoring ads and tips make sure to check your ad data, so I'll show you what that looks like here. All right, So this is my shelf for all the ads that I've run. So as you'll see, some of these air are performing well, and some are not performing well at all. So I have I've got some ads and I've I've written down the authors that have targeted ends just a little bit more about about that, Ed. And so I've started some of these a while ago. So this one, I've got a daily budget of 10. Well, for all of these, this one has got 102,634 impressions, but it's only got 49 clicks. So this one, this one is not doing very well in terms off the click to impression ratio there is. Why I've kept this one going is because that's that's a pretty good click rates average Click writes. This is this is how much I'm spending per average per click and have only spent $12 on this ad. But I've generated about $20 in sales. And so that keep in mind, this is this is the total amount that has been generated for that book. However, this is before Amazon takes its royalty. So Amazon is gonna take a cut of that as well. But even so, this one is doing fairly well. So I have just left it. This is the A Coast scores. They just determined this. This is the average cost of sales. This is the amount that you've spent on a campaign divided by the total sales during that campaign run. So this isn't necessarily accurate, a measure of how much money you've made. This is just going to take the sales and divided by how much you've spent and to determine what your score is here. So how much you've spent divided by the total sales? This if you're shooting for about one click per 1000 impressions, that's that's a pretty decent number. And so this might be suggesting that the ad that I've made is not very enticing. Or maybe it's buried way far down on that carousel by far. To the right. Maybe the price isn't very good. Maybe the reviews aren't good. So there's a lot of different reasons why people aren't clicking on that. But again, when people click I'm getting, I'm getting people to actually buy the book. So that's why I've kept that one running. As you see some of these, I've paused. So this one, this one's got a little bit better of a click ratio for impressions, and it's got a cheaper cost per click average. I've spent $32 in 11 cents, but I've only sold 99 cents worth of books for this. So this has got a ridiculous a Coast score. This is one that I probably should kill, but I figure I've only spent $32 on this since January, and now it's March. So in two months, that's, you know, divide that by about 60. That's not very much money, and, you know, it's made a lot of impression. So I figured, This is just you know, what the book is is showing up on a lot of people's radars here, so people are actually seeing it so but maybe that these people who who have seen the book with they'll buy the book down the line, I don't know, you know but it's not costing me all that much money to where I really care that much about it. This one. Here again, it's gots. This has got a very low impression to click ratio, and I'm spending 25 cents per click on this one, but I've only spent $7.26 and I've made $17.64 so again that I would keep that one going. And then this one has got a little better of a click per impression ratio. But again, I've only sold 99 cents worth of books on this. So the EKO scores ridiculous there, and I've killed this one. This was one that I didn't get any sales for, and the impressions per click one was pretty low, so I just got rid of it. This one was probably my best impression to click ratio, but I only sold $2.97 worth of books after spending 20 bucks. So I paused that one. So for me, my goal with ads right now because I'm a relatively new author is I'm just looking for impressions. I I want to get the book out in front of us many eyes as possible. And as you see, you know, depending on your budget, this might be a ladder A little. I haven't really spent all that much total since January. And, you know, I will have almost almost half a 1,000,000 people have seen my book. So I figured, you know, if you're paying for an ad on, like, a websites on books, ends or wherever, that's you might not get your book in front of that many eyes for, like, $50. So for me, this is you know, I My goal is just to get the book out there, and I could definitely refine or tweak these adds a little bit better. So just keep in minds, make sure you're monitoring your data and you're killing ads or pausing ads. You know, you can either pause it or terminate it. If you pause that, you can resume it later on. And I I terminated this one. This is a product display at that. After after like, a month, I only got 2353 impressions with one click, so I just killed this one. I just terminated it. Okay, so again, no what your goals are as an author. Know what your goals are for ads and see which ones they're working now. This coupled with my book, Bub adds, my sales have gone up across all platforms and I'm doing much better than I have in the past. But still, I'm not necessarily making I'm not making a lot of money on top of this, so I haven't made a ton yet with this. I do know a lot of authors who are spending a lot on these ads, and they're making a lot, though, You know, the idea is this is to make more than you're spending. So, like, this ad would be pretty good. This ad would be pretty good. This one is total correct, You know so But there are authors, their spending, you know, hundreds and thousands. Tens of thousands of dollars per month on ads. Once you start making the big bucks, you know, and once you once you have got some experience here, once you've refined your adds a little bit, once you know what you're doing, you could start increasing your budgets. And you know, it is long sure making money. If you spend $10,000 per month on ads, and you're making $20,000 per month than you're doing something right, all right, and some genres are gonna do better again. I write in a genre that's really difficult. There's not a market for it. I mean, the market is almost like non existent for independent literary books, and I feel that I'm doing fairly well in terms of sales compared with other people. I know a lot of other literary authors who are happy to sell, like one book every three months, and I'm I'm doing much better than that. I'm averaging because, like a hundreds to 120 books per month since December. So this is for me. This is a long term strategy. This is a strategy that I'm hoping will pay off. The more books that I write and you know, it's just a matter off Putting in the effort a B testing and knowing what your goals are all right says that's gonna help you to be successful with this. So pause ineffective or costly ads again, try a B testing. Keep refining your ad copy. All right, so some of these ads that are performing better. I've checked out there and copy and I have duplicated that and copy for other or have used that ad copy again for other ads and try both types of Ed's do the product display and the sponsored product ads. See which ones work better for you. Try different cost per click prices. Or what you could do is try reading books like Brian Mixes, Mastering Amazon Ads and Authors Guide. I haven't read this one, but I have heard nothing but great things. People just glow about this book on on the Facebook groups that I'm a part of. Okay, so next we're gonna discuss running ads on websites like Book Bub E Reader News today, etcetera And again, that book Bob, I mean book, but promotions. So it's separate from the book, Bub adds. So I hope you check this out. These air very powerful websites. This a powerful tool, at least that you could use the boost sales. And this is part of the launch strategy that I'm going to let you know about two. So this is an important lecture, and I hope to see you there 38. How to Sell Books using Websites like BookBub, BookSends, The Fussy Librarian...: I am. Welcome back to From First Draft, the best seller I'm John La Poma. And today we're gonna discuss how to set up ads on websites like Book bub E Reader News Today book sends the fussy librarian etcetera. So what are these websites? The's air websites that will advertise sales of your books. Now, say you normally in this e books, by the way, now say you normally sell your e book for 4 99 and you're gonna be running in 99 Cent Sale said you're doing your countdown deal on KDP Select. And you want to advertise this? How are people going to know about it? You know, so you can paid these websites to alert their subscribers to the sale of your book. All right, so you pay them a certain amount of money and they will email their subscribers and let their subscribers no hay. So in So's book is 99 cents for a limited time by it. So they click on that link, they go to the Amazon page and they buy your book. You want for these, you're gonna have to schedule these and pay in advance, so make sure that. You know, if you're going to schedule a sale that you have this organized down the line, you know you're not going to just will likely you're not going to just be able to set up one of these ads on one of these websites for, like, the next day, So make sure that you're organizing these well ahead of time. Some of these have a minimum review number and rating requirements. So, like you might need to have 10 reviews at a 4.5 rating on Amazon. I've found all of those to be crap in terms of they're just b s in that. Pretty much when I have submitted to these websites, they have still accepted my book. Even if I did not meet that minimum requirement so it might work for you, It might not work. And which are the best book? Bub is by far better than the rest off. All of them combined by far. So if you can get a book bub promotion, that is much better than a promotion on any of the other websites. And you should if they say yes, you should definitely jump up and click your heels in the air because you're gonna make a ton of money. The other ones that air that are, you know, come far in seconds but are still pretty good. These are ones that I recommend are ones like E reader News Today Book sends the fussy librarian Robin reads. Now that's what I haven't used. But a lot of people recommends book, gorilla, bargain books E and digital book today among a number of others. But these air some off the best. All right, so I'm gonna show you a few of these mainly book bump here. So that's that's the big one, so to do, to do a book but promotion. Just look into your partner accounts on book, bub. And then what you want to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and go to submit New Deal and then choose which books you'd like to submit a deal for. So I want to do one day before understanding the Allah Grant, and then you'll pick a category. So my books either fall into literary fiction or humor. Usually, summer of crude would just be literary fiction. It is not humorous at all, but as you see, there are a number of different categories here. Pick the one that works best for you, All right, in literary fiction. And then I'm gonna pick all regions. That's where that's where this promotion will be submitted to all regions, and you would put the original price. So my book is originally for 99 that will that will automatically convert that to the other stores, and then you can choose any of these prices. Now you may be thinking, Why would I pay book Bub to promote my book for free? Well, if book bub runs a free promotion for your book, you are likely to get anywhere from, like 20,000 toe like 100 over 100,000 downloads of your book. That's that's like you see, on average, maybe 2030 40,000 people who are reading your book, and maybe if they like it, they'll go by your other books. So this could be a fantastic way to get your name out there, especially if you're a new author and you give away a ton of your books and people love them and they you might get reviews for them, and this could really this could lead to you selling a lot more books. I typically do the 99 cent promotions. You'll get more downloads at 99 cents, then you will have the other price points. And these these are the cheapest ads to run. The free ads are cheapest on Book Club, and then the higher up you go in price, the more expensive they get. So let's just let's just do it for 99 cents. And then you would pick where the which retails you'd like to submit to the the ad for pick A dates put. Make sure your date is flexible because it's gonna make it much more likely that they'll pick you. If you have a flexible date in the comments, make sure you fill this part out, all right. And this is why I think that I've gotten book bug promotions in the past is that I've I've always filled out the comments, and I've let them know Hey, my books. Um, I would love to run a promotion with book bub, and don't follow this word by work. You know, this is just this is just me rapping here, so I would I would love to run a 99 cent promotion for my book Understanding. The Alec Ran. The book is was favorably reviewed by Kirkus, and it won second place in the Florida Authors and Publishers Association Presidents Awards in the contemporary in literary category. It's also been downloaded more than 600 times, you know, since it was published in August, and readers have the following to say about it and then just give some some positive blurbs about it. You know the book Right now. I think it's got, like, a four point something 4.5 average hot Amazon. So include that, you know, here, just brainstorm any type of accolades that you have gotten for your work or that you, as it off there have gotten, you know, maybe you are a best selling author. Or maybe you have given speeches to some important organization. Or maybe your Authors Guild member. I don't know, you know, think of anything that could potentially sway the book, bub staff to select your book for promotion. Now, keep in mind with this it. Most people get rejected. I think they only select 10% of submissions, and they also they're selecting specific books that they think are going to be better for their subscribers at that time so they might select. They might not select your book in March, but then they might select it in October, You know, depending on the needs of their subscribers and that the desires of their subscribers, they're changing up the types of books that they accept all the time. So if you don't get selected, I believe you have to wait four weeks before you can resubmit. Abide all of their guidelines, whatever they want you to do. Follow those guidelines, and that's going to help increase your chances of getting a book. But promotion. Make sure your cover looks good. Make sure you've got some positive editorial reviews, and if you come down here, check this out. $644 to run a book. But promotion. So you might be saying that's insane. Why would I pay that much? Because you're probably gonna make that much back and then some. Sometimes, you know, you break even. I know specifically of one author who sold almost 20,000 copies of her book, and she made I don't know what that with the how many more times back what she put in. But she made a ton on this, and she is now selling tons of books. Since that, I mean she's She's become like a best selling author on Amazon as a result of this, So book bub is one of the best ways to get your your books out there. Also, some of the other good sites are books ends, So this is books enz dot com to advertise their click on this advertise on book sentence link up here, and then you'll see that they do have some requirements. You need at least five reviews with a high overall average, an attractive cover, a sale price plan of less than $3 at least 50% of the full price. But some of these things, like I ran an ad campaign for my book, The Summer of Crowd, the first week of its publication, and it didn't have any reviews at that time, and they still accepted it. So I don't think these are rules air necessarily written in stone. If you have got a really high quality book, submit it and see what they say. This is always a part of my launch strategy of submitting to these thes advertisers because it'll help for you to have a successful first week, and it will help you to bump yourself up in the Amazon rankings. So you just fill out all this information, you know, you pick a category as you see that as as the price of the book increases, so does the price for the ad. And you could add on extra features and then submit it. You know, same thing here with the fussy librarian. It says getting started. Uh, so I go down to four authors and then just read all the information here and submit your book, you know? So it's pretty easy to set up for these. I would definitely I'm gonna give you some tips here. I would do add stacking tutors to improve the results of these. So if you're gonna be running one of these, say run the fusty library and add one day. You could do book, sentence and book, bub. An e reader news today. Do those each 11 of those each day, and that will keep your book up there in the Amazon rankings. You know, So it's better. It's better to have steady sales over a number of days on Amazon than it is to have a spike of sales on one day and then for that to fall off the next day, you know. So that is, that is a good strategy for boosting your books. Performance on Amazon is toe add. Stack these so just to one each day for, like, a period of a week, and that will keep your ranking up. Hi, consistently over that. That's week were applicable right about your books. Accomplishments awards to increase your chances of being accepted. This is really important. Keep a spreadsheet with the ad information. So keep a spreadsheet for whenever you have applied for these ads, which adds, you've applied for when you apply for it. Were you accepted? When did the ad run? When are you allowed to submit another promotion? And so this way you can stay on top of these things and you could even set up an alert on your phone or whatever on your calendar to let you know when you're OK to resubmit for another ed. All right, so keep keep keep all this information organized it's really important because you will get confused. And if you know which ads you run when you know when to run them again also, what I would do and a good, good reason to add Stack is you can find out if you're doing just one of these promotions per day. You can check your sales data each day to see which of these is doing better. And in the future, if you find like, hey, book a real I only sold two books and books sends I sold 30. You don't cook book gorilla out of your promotion next time you run one of these, so keep that keep all of your data organized and keep it all handy. So this way you know when to run your promotions again. You know which ones were the most effective and all of that. If you don't succeed with book, bub, try. Try again. You know, again, you might not get accepted in March, but then in October, because of the season or whatever, they might accept your book. So just keep trying. Don't annoy them. Don't don't resubmit. The day after you were declines, because you're not supposed to do that, Make sure you're following the rules and you may get accepted. Okay, so next we're going to discuss how to get your book into bookstores. So this this may be something that is really important to you. To some off there is they're happy enough just selling e books on Amazon. But some people really do want to see their books in stores. To me, I feel like that's the measure off whether or not you've made it as an author from myself. Whether I have made it is an author is seeing my book in stores, and I have gotten my book into stores and I'm gonna share with you some tips on how to do that. So I hope you join us next, and I hope you're having a great time. 39. How to Convince Bookstores to Buy and Sell your Books: All right, Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm Johnny Lymphoma, and we're gonna talk today about how to get your beloved, beautiful, high quality book into bookstores. All right, so bookstores and I'm talking about brick and mortar stores here. I'm talking about like Barnes and Noble, where you could drive your car up and walk into the store and get a cappuccino while browsing your books. They have limited shelf space, so because they have that what, like stores like Amazon, they can. They can sell millions of books, all right, because it's everything is online. And if if you're selling a print book, Amazon just Alert syndrome spark, create space or whatever toe print that book and ship it. Amazon doesn't have toe warehouse your books. You know there's they. They don't have to worry about shelf space bookstores like Barnes and Noble or your local independent bookstore. They have limited shelf space, so they could only hold a number of books at any given time. And if your book is not selling, they are going to want to return that book so they can get a book into their store that readers are going to buy. So you're gonna want to give that bookstore a 40% discount of your book because that's just a industry standard. And if you're not offering that discount, they're very unlikely to buy your book again. You want to make those books returnable? If your book is not returnable, they're unlikely to buy it because they're taking a risk in that again, they've got limited shelf space. Or if they're buying a book, that that they can't return. If that book's not selling, then they've just wasted their money on that purchase. So make sure to set your books is returnable, if you can. Your books do need to have an I s bien. In order for bookstores to to sell them and your book, it should be listed in Ingram. Alright, so that's gonna that's gonna help you to get your books sold in stores. I mean, you can distribute your own books. You can't just print them up yourself and go to your local bookstore and say, Hey, will you buy my books and stuck them on your shelves and sell them on your shelves and the bookstore? Maybe they'll say yes. But what happens is instead of wanting to buy books from AH, 100 different publishers. The book stores are gonna prefer to buy books from in your room because they can create a big order, pay for it at once and get those books shipped at once instead of having to pay difference publishers to get those books so it makes it easier for bookstores. So if you can get your book listed on Ingram, you have just increase your chances of getting it in a bookstore. It is difficult to get your books in bookstores, but not impossible now. How to get it into stores. Here's a tip creating information sheet with important information, so I always do this with my books. I will write up a sheet that's got, like Title That's got the The author of the eye, ESPN. The Price for the Print and the Ebro. Copy the publisher. The sales information. The discount I've got the book's blurbs synopsis synopsis. I've got review blurbs. I've got a bio. I've got what makes this title stand out, why you should stock it on your shelves and I've got contact information, so I submit this to bookstores whenever I submit a review copy of my book for them are not a review copy, but just a sample copy for them to look at again. Make a spreadsheet with book stores that sell books in your genre, and this doesn't have to even just be local bookstores. You can, you know, make a Make a list of bookstores in San Francisco and Seattle and Vancouver in New York, in Denver, wherever you know, and then call those stores and see if they stocked books in your genre and then see if the bookseller or finally, the bookseller is and then ask that person if they would stock your books or sell your books. I'm sorry, and sometimes they'll they'll say yes, and then they'll ask you to submit a sample copy of your book, submit the information sheet, and if they like it, they might sell your book in their stores. So to do that, you're gonna have to research who the book seller is. So each of these stores has got somebody who will buy the books or maybe a group of people who will buy the books. So if you find out who that person is, start to establish a relationship with that person. Contact them and don't be annoying, by the way, don't just keep saying bye now. Bye now. Bye Now find out who that person is. It's best to speak with that in person. If you can be professional, be nice and ask them if you can leave a sample of your book with them and your information sheet. Don't be pushy. They may be really happy about that. They might want. They may be really excited. Toe. Have a local persons books in their stores. If you can't meet the person, call him on the phone or email them. Try to establish a relationship with this person. If they turn you down, find out why they turned you down. Maybe it's just not the right time for them to buy new books, but it will be in a few months. So ask him if it's okay for you to contact them again. You know, relationships, networking, that that's going to help you in this game here. And so I already discussed that part and develop a relationship with this person. See how you can help them. You know, don't make this all about you and your books and by now, and see See what you can maybe do for the bookstore. See if you can. I don't know if you can advertise an event for that bookstore to your people on your mailing list. See if and you know, like whatever you can do that might help that seller outer that bookstore out. And this way you're not just hitting them with, like, a whole by now pitch, you're becoming somebody that that they they like that they know is that they've got a relationship that's kind of give and take relationship. So and then ask if you could send them a copy of her book with the information sheets. I already explained that. And also let them know you're marketing strategies if you have one. So if you have a publicist, let them know about that. If you have, like an upcoming radio interview on a local radio station, let them know that you'll pitch their bookstore when you're giving your interview on that radio station. If you got a TV broadcast coming up like if you're gonna be on a television program, let that books are No. Hey, you're gonna you're going to alert the people on that program to buy the book in your store net might entice that seller to want to stock your book. So again, think like a seller. Think about how you can help this book seller out. Maybe you can create an event that you believe will help to get readers into their stores, you know. So this is all this is all about you being creative and you being an entrepreneur here. All right, so wholesalers versus distributors likely you won't have a distributor. That's that's somebody who's going to go to bookstores and sell your book to that bookstore for you. And that person keeps a percentage of all the sales. You likely don't have one of those if you do the great. But if you can get a distributor, you pay them a cut of your sails to get the book in the store. So if you can get one, that would be great. That would help you to get your book into stores and a whole cellar. These are just people who have who are supplying your book. You know, like Ingraham is, has my book listed on their their catalogue. However, they're not actively trying to distribute my books to bookstores. They just have it available for purchase. So that's the difference between the two is that distributors will actually go out and try to sell your books for you. They're not just stocking your books and printing your books, all right, so there are some services that will help you net daily so this again, it's expensive. But there are books sellers that are on that Gelli and they are looking for the hottest new books that are coming out. And I noticed that on Ingram. I had sold 20 Eights print books after listing my book on Net Galley. Now I'm assuming that those books were sold to booksellers or librarians. Sonett Galley is a way for you to get your book out there to booksellers. They are there on that site that looking for the next best seller. They might not even interact with you. They might not respond to you. They might not review your book, but if they buy it, who cares if they're interacting with you or not? You know you could also get your book on the IBP, a bookstore catalogue, which for me was not as effective as net jelly. I did have a few booksellers contact me after seeing my book on this catalogue, but I don't think it resulted in any sales. I don't know about that, but I'm pretty sure it did not result in sales Teoh bookstores. But it might work for you, all right. And if you want your your books to be sold in Barnes and Noble, it is possible. But it's not probable. You know, all you have to do is follow their guidelines. You would not just go down to your local Barnes and Noble and ask them to sell your book. You have to submit one copy of your book along with specific information that they request to their headquarters in New York, and then they'll review your book to see whether or not they will sell it in their stores. So don't bother going down to your local Barnes and Noble EDS and trying to sell your books there, submit it to that's that New York address, and you could find that Just do a Google search and how to submit a book to Barnes Noble. So here's some tips. Be aware that Ingraham takes 15% of your discount percentage. So this was something that I learned the hard way, and I think I already explained to you this story. But I went down to a bookstore in San Diego and I spoke with the bookseller and I asked her if she would sell my book. And she said Sure. And then when she checked it in Groom, she was saying that there was only a 25% discount, and I told her, No, there was. My publisher told me that there was a 40% discount, and so I told my publisher and he checked in growth and he said, Yes, it's it's a 40% discount He confirmed it. So I called her and said, My publisher confirmed that it was a 40% discount. Can you check again? And I did. This was very nice about It was it was like a jerk about it, and she checked again, and she said it was still 25%. I found out later on that the reason why it was 25% is that in groom was taking 15% off that that discount themselves. So if you want to sell your books for a 40% discount to book stores. You have to set it up for a 55% discount discount on Ingram's spark. Otherwise, it's gonna show up as a lower discounts for booksellers. Make sure you have your book's title and you're off the name on the spine. This is a requirement for some bookstores, because most of the time your book is going to be stocked with that. That's spying out, not the front cover out. Set a competitive retail price. If you're selling your book for $25 all other books in your genre are selling for 12 no bookstore is going to sell your books. So make sure to find out what your competitors books are selling for and set your book at a competitive price. Also, if you're selling to local bookstores, let them know that you're a local because that mites that might entice them to sell your books in that they know your friends and family are probably going to be stopping in to buy your books. And then if you run events, friends and family will probably be attending those events. So established relationships with your local books up booksellers or book stores and see if you can get your books in their stores. I have got my book here in in a local bookstore, and it is sold incredibly well. I live in Ah, small beach town here in San Diego, and people here are very they're very. They're very proud of the town where I live in. And so when I sell the books in the store, I have put a little note under the books that I am a local author, and I think that has helped people. I think it's helped me to sell a lot of books there, and I saw about from remembering correctly. It sold about 20 print copies of my book in, like, six or seven Months, which is very good in a in a bookstore for a book that's got pretty much no marketing campaign, that is for an unknown author, you know, So definitely work with your local book stores to try to get your book in there, be respectful and professional all times. Tell the butcher accolades and great reviews without bragging. Leave bookmarks and promotional materials at these stores again see if you can participate in any events and with returns, keep in mind that they might return your book, so don't spend the money that you earn right away. Keep it aside. If you can't afford it, keep it aside. So this way, if there are returns, you're not losing money. This is a tip here. To that, I would highly recommend give free copies away to the employees of the bookstores. In my experience, when I've done this, I have turned book sellers into fans off my books. And when those people are fans of your books, they then sell your books to other readers who come in. They recommend your book to other readers, and I had, ah, bookstore employee glowing when the bookseller was around and that book seller he, you know, he agreed to stock my books or to sell my books, but he didn't know who I was. And when he heard this employee glowing about my books, Hey became really interested in the book as well, and I gave him a free copy. So I'm hoping that he likes the book as well, and that will lead to an even better relationship with this owner. Also asked sellers to recommend your book on Indy Bound. This is a website that independent bookstores use to to find and recommends new books. So if you get a whole bunch of sellers who are recommending your books on this site, it may encourage other booksellers to buy books and and sell them in their stores. All right, so next we're gonna discuss how to get your book in tow libraries, and it's gonna be very similar. So some of the strategies will be the same, but some will be tailored specifically to libraries. So I hope that this has been useful for you, and I hope you stick around for our next lecture. 40. How to Convince Librarians to Buy your Books for their Libraries: All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John La Poma. And today we're gonna discuss how does get your book into libraries? Right. So libraries also have standards, just as do bookstores. They want attractive and durable books. Keep in mind, durable durability is really important to libraries. Because if they buy a book once, they want to be able to check that book out to multiple people. So durability is really important to librarians. So make sure that your books pastor durability tests, they will buy your books. All right, They are looking for new books all the time, and they will be open to buy your books. Just make sure that you're you're giving them, ah, high quality book to entice them to want to buy it. Word spreads in the library community as well. So if if you're a hot new author, librarians are going to discuss you, you know? So So make sure that again you're creating good relationships with people at libraries and let them get to know you be professional, and word may spread that you're a great person to to work with. You know, you're a great person. Who whose books they want to buy how to get your books into libraries, creating information sheet with the most important information on it. This is the same as I told you in the last lecture. And instead of contacting the booksellers, contact the head librarians and find out what their policies are about how to submit books for consideration. Develop a relationship with this person, if possible, and again see how you can help them. See if you could advertise any events they have coming up to your mailing list. Subscribers. See if you could go yourself. You know, see if you can contribute to any of these events. See whatever you can do to help that person out and to create that good relationship with them again. Ask them to if you consent them a copy of your book with the information sheet, and it's best to do this in person. I went down to the Central Library here in San Diego, and I met with the seller. I gave her a copy of my book and the books information, and like a month or two later, I noticed that I had 32 sales for print books, and I'm pretty sure that that those books were purchased by that librarian and stock in the libraries here in San Diego again, Let them know you're marketing strategies, if any. They also want people to want your books. You know they want to stock popular books because they want They want people to come in and check those books out. So if you have got some some strong marketing strategies coming up, that's, you know, you know you're gonna be on a radio station or whatever and that you're gonna let people know that they can find the book at that local library. People that the libraries, they're gonna be more likely to want to stock your books. And they're also gonna be likely to stock your books if they're popular, because that's gonna drive more people into the bookstore, let them know about any events you have plans or that you might be able to do at the library itself and again keep a spreadsheet to track all of this information. Okay, so again, net galley and the IBP air here to help you out Net. Galley has got a ton of librarians on it, just like booksellers and bookstore owners. And so you may find librarians who who found your book on Net galley. There's also a library market E blast catalogue on the IBP A, and that is sent out to librarians. And if the librarians like your book or they're interested, they might pick it up and sell in there or not sell it, but stock it in their libraries. That's tips. Make sure your spelling people's names directly, right? So if if somebody spells the name. Rachel R. A. C eight r A c h a l as opposed to e l make sure spelling their name correctly. I guess this just goes along with the whole professionalism. So if you're smelling people's names and correct that, they might not want to Teoh answer your emails to your phone calls. Let them know your local. If you are local, be respectful and professional. Show off your accolades and great reviews. Leave bookmarks and promotional materials if they'll let you see if you could participate in any events, and that's pretty much it. You know, it's it's pretty similar to the bookstores one. So if you skipped that one, I would go back and watch. That's lecture because that will add a little bit more information about some of those topics. I just breezed over here. All right, so next I'm going to give you launch strategies. So these are strategies to help you launch your book on on its publication day to have the most successful publication day and week and month and whatever as possible. So you don't want to check this one out, and I hope that I 41. Learn Launch Strategies to Maximize Sales/Visibility for your Book's Publication: All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm Johnny HLA Poma, and I'm gonna talk with you today about launch strategies. So what is a launch? This is preparing your book's publication for its best possible sales results. And not just sales visibility and just overall promotion for you as an author. So we're gonna we're gonna talk about how to best launch your book in this lecture. So here are some book launch strategies. Make sure in the weeks leading up to your book's publication day that you're posting good reviews on social media or any accolades. Like if if your book just won an award, make sure to publish that Or like for me. When Burns and Noble selected my book to the press presents list, I let my social Media subscribers know about that, all right? And this is a good way of just alerting people to the fact that your book is coming getting them interested in it without put it, you know, showing them by now by now. By now 10,000 times, let's your mailing this know about all this information as well, and also remind your street team or your reader team or whatever to leave reviews for your book, you know, remind them a day or two before the book is published. So this way they're ready to post their reviews on the book's publication Date And I Did give you a tip previously about setting the print books Publication Day for a few days before the E book. So this way you can get reviews up there before the book is published in E book form, which is the form that most people will probably buy your book in. Also, run a sale like a 99 cent sale for that first week and run ads for it on websites like the Fusty Library in Book sends book Bub, if you can, that is a great way to get a lot of sales. And if you stack those ads like I had mentioned in the ads section, you can help to boost your Amazon ranking. So this way you want to boost that ranking. So this way that Amazon starts to show it to more customers, and it moves up those bestseller lists when it's in those bestseller lists. More people who are searching for those books in those genres are going to find your book and potentially read your book. So the better your Amazon ranking, the Mauritz going to show your book is gonna show up on Amazon and the better your chances are of getting more sales. Also apply for a book club promotion. It can't hurt. See what they have to say and run your Facebook, Amazon and book bub ads as well. And this is something we haven't discussed it all in this lecture series, but you can create a press release and send that to members of your local media and this way. And I would do that a month or two, at least maybe three months before your book is coming out, just to let them know that the book is coming and to see if they'd be interested in reviewing it or doing a little, write up about it and and pitch the whole local angle, because that make might make them more likely to write about your book. It's difficult to get your book reviewed by by publications like The New York Times or whatever, but it's not impossible, you know, so you can at least try for it if that's your goal and and cross your fingers and maybe it will work out for you. You can also hire a publicist, depending on your budget, and this person will do all of that hard work for you. So if you can swing it, I would recommend hiring a publicist. I did that for developing minds. My first book and I had people at high times request the book. I had people at the Times in In the UK request the book. I did radio interviews on some very big radio stations in the Midwest, and I got the book in a number off smaller publications that the Times and High Times did not end up reviewing the book. But I did get some pretty big names to request that book. So this is stuff you want to do before the book is published, because the traditional media they're not likely gonna get care about your book after it's been published. You want toe get this, you know, leading up like the months leading up to the book. That's when you want to get this promotional strategy with the press releases in all that moving along. Also, update your website some of the types of things that you want to put on your website are links to your book on Amazon and Kobo and wherever it's being sold at a free sample copy of of a free sample chapter. Sorry, let the update your website with positive review blurbs. You know, make sure that your website looks good. It's not too cluttered, but make sure it's got all that information on there, so that when people look you up there getting a professional, attractive website that they're looking at, also run good reads giveaways or library things. Giveaways The end on the book's publication day Because this is when you're likely going to get the most people who are going to request that book and something. You're gonna get a lot of eyes on your book that day. And some of those people might just end up buying the book because they know they're probably not gonna win it anyways and do mailing list swaps. So I explain this in the email list swap section. Just if you get a couple of other authors together who've got mailing lists about the same size as yours, let them know about your book its publication date because they can let their subscribers know about that, and then in return, you would just have to do that for those authors when they have new books coming out and what you could do to is have a launch party. This is something that I have never done, but I know off authors who have done it where they've been. We rented a venue or they've had people come over to their house or they have done an event at a book store where they sold books. You know where they've just had a party for their family and friends. So you know, however you want to celebrate, go ahead and do that. And that's just another option that you have our tips set up sales a few days before the ad dates. What I mean by that is make sure you're setting your like 99 cent promotion. Set that sale price a few days before your ads run because it might take a few days for Amazon or kobo or wherever to update That's price to the new price, and you definitely don't want to have paid website like E reader news today or whatever, some price. And then they don't run your ad because the price was not set the correct price against check your ads or staying your ads to boost results. What I would do to and this this point seem really vain. But this is something that I do is that Check Google to see if your book has hit any lists like Amazon's hot New Releases list. I found out that my book understood developing minds. It hits a really high list on iBooks. After I ran a book about promotion and also my books, I believe they've all been Amazon hot new releases and when. If you do find that your book is a hot and release, take a screenshot of it, you know, screen shit. Shoot it with your phone or your computer. So this way you can use that for to promote your book on your Facebook page or INSTAGRAM or to your mailing list. Let them know. Hey, my book hit number three on Amazon's hot new releases in literary fiction, you know. So this way it keeps the mo mentum going. You're letting readers and potential readers know that your book is worth checking out. This is for people who are maybe on your Facebook friends list who haven't yet bought your book. But if they're seeing that, you know, it's a hot new release and it's it's winning these awards, and it's doing so well, they might say, Hey, I'll check out the book, you know. So this is This is a way that you can sell books without being sales. E is if again, if your book is a hot new release, just post that on Facebook. Hey, check it out. My book is a hot new release on Amazon's UK store. You're not saying Hey, by now you're letting people know. Hey, my book is worth checking out. You make the decision cost potential customer about whether or not you want to buy. But I'm not hitting you with Hebei. It right now promote any lists you have made as well. So like on Amazon, if you have made like a best seller list, make sure to promote the hell out of that. I was a number one Amazon bestseller in a number of categories after running book Bub Review promotions have also hit these lists pretty highly, with outs running book club promotions. And so I take screenshots whenever my books rise up the rankings. This way I can promote that on my website on social media to my mailing list and then can continue to show good reviews on social media without saying by now, you know, any time something good happens with your book, if it's if it's if there's an article in a local newspaper. If you just did an interview, make sure that advertised that information on Facebook to your mailing lists, etcetera and this way again, you're just like I said before, people are seeing that book and they can make the decision to buy it without being told to buy it. Use your sales numbers to try to entice bookstores to sell your books. So if your book is selling really well, include that in the information sheet that you sent to bookstores or toe librarians. Let him know. Hey, I sold 1000 copies of my book in the first month of its publication that is very likely to to inspire these people to buy your book and again set your books Prince publication date for a few days before so that you can get reviews on sites like Amazon. So I've discussed that very. And I think, most importantly is have fun. You know, half moment. This this is this is the day that you have been waiting for for maybe years, months, weeks and try to have fun with it. You know, don't be so obsessed over a number of said. Oh, well, I only sold 14 books today. I realized that that's just one day. That's the first day. This the thing about selling books is that it's not now, with with independent and self publishing, you don't have to worry about selling a certain number of books in a certain amount of time as long as you're promoting your book. Still, you'll probably sell books 5 10 15 20 years after you have published your book. You know something? You're promoting it and continuing to publish new books. So try not to try not to have a whole search set of expectations. That may be unreasonable and just try to enjoy that day. Try to celebrate the fact that you have got a book that's out there, and even if you're not hitting specific numbers, don't don't be upset about it. Like I've said in previous lectures, you you might be surprised at how little support you get from family and friends. You know, you might have a huge family, a huge friend base, and maybe you've got 600 people in that. That's you know, that base and maybe 12 of them by your book. It's it's nuts that's not so uncommon for a lot off authors. And again, these people, they have got their own lives. They have. You know, they might not even be interested in your book. They might not be interested in reading. You know, keep in mind that these people don't owe you anything, So try toe, have a healthier viewpoint on all of this ads. And if you're not selling as much as you'd like to on that first day or that first week, realize that this is a journey, all right, this is this so usually a long term journey for a lot of writers to become successful. If you are a no name author, if nobody's ever heard of you, you are very unlikely to be a best selling off their right away. It's going to take some time so have fun. Enjoy the journey. And that's pretty much it that I have for you for this. All right. And up next, we're gonna discuss contests and why it may be beneficial for you to enter contests. All right, so I hope that you stick around and I hope to see you next time. 42. A Vetted List of Contests for Self-Published Books: All right. Welcome back to from First draft, that bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be talking about contests. So why should you enter contests? Just to be clear, these air contests specifically four self published or independently published books. If you win a contest, your book will get exposure now, depending on the the size of the competition or is level of prestige, you're going toe to receive varying levels of exposure from that, you know, if you win a National Book Award versus some small local award like it's your library. Obviously, the National Book Award is going to do much more for your book in terms of exposure. But if you do win a competition, you can be. Your book will be listed on that websites. Your book will be listed for the competition. A lot of the competition's send out press releases once the they've they've announced, they're winners. And so this is just a good way for you to get exposure for your book. Also, if you win a competition, you'll get credibility as a writer. You know, this is this is an outside party that is affirming you and your work so this is just something that's going to help your credibility. Also, you can add award winning to your bio, which is something that may help you to gain credibility and to get more sales and t build your readership. Also, if you win an award, you can add your award seals to your books Cover. Now if you check out my book here, understanding the Alec Rat. I won Silver in the 2000. It was 2018 to those 17 Florida Authors and Publishers Association presidents awards, All right, and so I was given a digital award file that I forwarded to my book designer, and he added this award seal to my novel. So when the book is printed out, it has that award seal already on there. With some competitions, you may win a roll of stickers that you can put on the cover of your book. But what I like about having this digital file is that it's always there. You don't have toe add stickers. You don't have toe spend time, you know, putting this stuff on yourself. It's just a part of that book's cover part of the file, and it'll show up here on Amazon will show up on nook. You know, wherever wherever you publish your book, when you have the wherever your books cover is showing. Basically, you'll have this award seal there. Okay, so here is a list of contests. Some of these I've entered, some I haven't entered, but this is a vetted list here for you. This is a list of competitions that's generally are, are credible and that they're not out to hurt writers. There are a lot of competitions out there, and some of them are charging exorbitant fees and have pretty much no return. You know this. There's really no benefit to winning the competition. And so some of them are scams. These air, not thes air, not competitions that are scams here. So the Eric offer awards. This is a fairly prestigious award in the end of Independence and self publishing community , the International Book Publishers Association's Benjamin Franklin Awards. This is another one of the top awards for self published books, The Hugo Awards. This is on award competition, mainly for science fiction books, and I've heard a lot of great things about this one. I don't write science patients. I've never entered this one. The Indy Fab Awards. This one is put together by foreword reviews, which is a very credible source in publishing the International Bribery Book Awards or I don't really know how to pronounce That's. And perhaps I should be using an English accent because this is one from the U. K. And this is a really prestigious one. The Independent Publisher Book Awards. I have not entered this one. I know people who have entered it and have been pleased with it. The Florida Authors and Publishers Association Presidents Awards. I am now two for two. In this competition, I had a book come in. Third place or developing minds came in third place and understanding. The Alec Ran came in second place. And so I I have already submitted the Summer of crude for the 2018 competition. The Next Generation indie book Awards readers Favorites. This is, Ah, fairly large competition, A Lot of Categories and The Writer's Digest self published E Book Awards, which I've never entered when also the American Book Awards. Okay, so here's some tips. If you come across the competition and you want to check to see whether or not, it is credible. Check out the book or that the competition on websites like predators and editors and writer beware just to see you again. There are a lot of scams out there, a lot of scammers looking to to separate you from your money. Just make sure that you're covering yourself before doing it, that toe submitting your book to any of these competitions. Also, check to see if your book is a good fit for the competition. Like I said, I have not entered the Hugo Award because I do not write science fiction. All right, so if you writing genres, check out to see whether or not there's a category for books in your genre. If not, it may be best for you to save your money and just enter another competition again. Keep a spreadsheet with names, the contests you've entered or the names of the contest. You'd like to enter the cost that due dates whether or not you can submit a print book or an e book. And if you have submitted that when you have entered, you know, write down the addresses of where you need to ship books if you do indeed need to ship books, write down the number of copies you need to send, you know. So this this is really good information. And I'm glad that I have kept a spreadsheet because I have used the similar similar spreadsheet for each of my books now, and it's made it so much easier. Every time I published a book, I know the names of the competitions that I want an answer. I know when they you know, at least approximately when they're going to to have a deadline for their submissions, approximately how much money the submission will cost. So again, just just keep your spreadsheets. Also, follow the guidelines Exactly. If they tell you to submits three paperback copies of your book and you email them a pdf, you're probably not going to win. All right, if they ask for you to include your books information in the front cover of your book, you know, in a little piece of paper folded up and put in the front cover, do just that. If you're not following the guidelines, you're going to upset them. And if you upset that, you're going to reduce your chances of winning all right, answered before your book is published, if possible. Because if you do win an award and your if you wouldn't award, it's possible that you might win that award before your book has been published. And then you can add that award seal to your books cover. All right, All right. So we go back here to my books. Amazon Page and I had won this award before this book was published, so I was able to get that award seal on before my publication date. Also, see hair. I added Silver medal, Silver Medal, winner of the 2017 faith of Presidents awards, contemporary and literary category. So you could add this information to to your Amazon page or your Barnes and Noble page. Whatever. And you could include it too. On the inside, cover in your front matter. Okay, add award seals to your front cover. So we're to discuss that and send a press release if you win. All right. So this is something you know, anybody can send a press release. You can send it on a number of press release websites online. You could just right oppa release rights, you know, right in the third person don't write in first person. I'm just right up the fact that you know so and so. Award winning author. Just one day, Hugo Awards for best, you know, whatever book on, then just give, like a quote from the competition. You know what the competition is about? If there's any feedback that they had given you, you could include that in your press release and then just submit it. You don't see what happens. Chances are nobody's gonna look at it. But there's a possibility that someone, somewhere, might look at this press release. You know, someone from the media might look at this press release and maybe the print something about you, you know, so it couldn't hurt, sent a press release. If you do win, and then make sure to update your websites and your information sheet to which I've told you about in previous lectures. You know, I keep information sheet to send to bookstores and libraries. This is something that you can update if you win an award. All right. And so up next, I'm gonna be giving you tips and warnings. This is just general tips and warnings for publishing all right. So I hope you stick around for this lecture, and I hope that this has been a useful topic of discussion for you. 43. General Tips/Warnings for New Authors: All right, welcome back to from first drafted bestseller I'm John Lymphoma. And in this lecture, I'm going to be discussing some general tips and warnings for self published authors. All right, so in the tips section, here's one. Change the background color off your word files or pages, or I don't know if you can do it in pages, but I know you can do it inward. So this way you can reduce your eyestrain. That's why I always make the the backgrounds for my pages a a darker color, but not so dark that I can't see the writing on. And this just helps me to cut down on that strain. And once I have been staring at the page that has got a darker backgrounds, and then I look at one with the brighter background. It hurts my eyes and which makes me think that, you know, if if I'm looking at the brighter one for hours on end, I am, you know, causing myself that much more I string. So that's just a little tip I've picked up over over the years. Make sure to change that. Also, to sell more books, write more books, all of these strategies that I'm giving to you. They If you just rinse and repeat with new books, it is going to multiply the effects of off of your effectiveness of your promotions and ads and all of that. So, you know, if you've got 10 books that that readers come by and versus one you know clearly if people are liking your books, they're probably gonna buy more of your books. So if you're gonna if you want to sell more books, write more books, say you've got 10 books and you're selling two copies a day versus one book were selling two copies a day. That's two total sales versus 20 total sales. And if you're making $3 per sale at $60 per day, you know that's that's That's pretty good chunk of change. So, you know, to sell more books right more. With that being said, don't burn yourself out. It can be very, very easy for you to have all of these goals. And when you don't meet those goals, maybe you get sick or you're just feeling tired, you know, for you not to meet those goals, and sometimes people push through that you know, to be perfectly honest right now, I'm not feeling very well and I'm still making this. And so maybe I am not following my own advice. And that's, you know, I'm feeling a little burned out just with work and with by writing and just overall, I'm not feeling well, so I should probably be taking this day off. So maybe I need to take my own advice. But don't push yourself so hard that you get to that breaking point. It's important to have goals, short term and long term goals, but you are also a human being, all right. You are also a person who needs love ends. You need food, and you need rest. And you need, you know, entertainment yourself. If you're just spending all of your life locked away in your apartments or your house and you're just typing all the time, you know you're gonna live in balanced life. So try to find a way to balance out the work and the play. You know, find a way toe, make sure that you're healthy while you're doing all of this. If you spent the whole day writing, go for a walk, hop on your exercise bicycle Hit the gym, you know, go out dancing, try to balance things out. You know I don't. So I don't know me to be preaching here about all of this. This is just in my own experience. What? I was younger. I used to write until I couldn't take it anymore. And what I would find is that I was I would get, like, you know, physical health problems. After I finished editing understanding the L. A. Kratt I had spent so many consecutive hours doing that. It took me about 500 hours to add it. That book when I finished the book, that's that next day, when I went to work, I I was literally having problems seeing, you know, I went toe edit an email that I was writing to apparent, and I literally could not write the word Can't. I couldn't. I couldn't Even my brain couldn't even process how to write this word. And I thought, Hey, maybe I'm having a stroke. EMS, I believe it or not, went to the emergency room that night because I just wanted to see and the doctor told me there's no way that somebody with my family, history and my age could possibly be having a stroke. And so it was clearly a result of having just warn myself down so much with editing that I literally put myself in the hospital, you know, so follow, You know, don't don't do what I have done with with future projects. After that, I have definitely tried to listen to my body more, and I've tried to listen to myself when it's telling me to take a break. I have been doing that with the exception of today. So also, one general tip is to leave your books around town. At least here in San Diego, we've got these things called little Libraries, where you can leave books and people can take books for free. And so I have left copies of my books in those little libraries. Also think about places where people spend time just hanging out with with nothing to do. Maybe it like laundromats or auto garages or dentist's office waiting rooms. You know, leave copies of your books there, and we'll see first, you know if if the dentist will let you do that, but that could be a great way to get people to check out your books while they're just trying to to spend some idle time. Also, don't be a dick. I've mentioned this before. Be professional in your interactions with people. You could be a dick if you want. If that's your thing, be a dick, all right. But it's it's You're probably gonna get better results if your professional with people and respectful with people. If reviewers air leaving your nasty reviews, don't write back telling them to go screw themselves. You know, just try to be as professional as you can with this. I think that you will end up going further that way than if you are. You're being addicted People okay, also read books and other genres. So if you're writing in SciFi just SciFi books, make sure you're reading books in their mysteries. Make sure you're reading books that are young adults or coming of age, literary books or whatever. You know. Try to get some difference styles. Make yourself aware of different styles. See how that the authors developed characters. See how the authors develop the plot. See what is interesting to you. See what worked for you in this story and you know you could maybe incorporate those elements into your own writing and that, I think will help you to also find your own voice and unique viewpoint. And I believe that everybody has got a unique voice, and I feel like I'm refining that more and more with each of my projects I'm getting. I'm finding more and more who I am as a writer, and I'm letting that shine through. And I think some of this just happens with with experience. The more you write, the more that voice shines through. And I think some strategies to find that voice as a writer is to really listen to that voice inside of you. The one that is that is telling you to write this story that's telling you what that next story is to write. You know that that voice inside of you, that is that is making you excited to right? I think if you let that voice guide you rather than the voices from the outside world, rather than the markets, rather than what readers seem to be buying nowadays, what's people have criticized the batch of previous books? You know, I think that when you when you listen more to that voice, your writing, more original and new unique stories. And I think that in my own opinion, writers or readers, I'm sorry. Will b'more more likely to respond to those books? Maybe not positively. But I think that those books will beam or important to the readers that that, like those books, you know. And so I think if you're trying to just rights for everyone, you're writing for No. One, if you're if you don't have a voice, you know that you that's exactly it. You don't have a voice, so try to find out what your voices and to let that shine in all of your your writing. Also let the writing and marketing become a lifestyle rather than something you force. So what I mean by that is it's kind of like with dieting. I think a lot of people don't succeed when they diet. When they're forcing themselves to eat this food that tastes like crap, they're forcing themselves to exercise more than than they feel. You know that when they want to. And I think when people just start setting a whole bunch of restrictions in their lives, they end up. Maybe they stick that diet for a week, maybe a month, maybe two months. But they end up snapping and going right back to the way they were before because they've set a whole bunch of unrealistic goals and expectations for themselves. They they have not. They have not just submitted to living a healthy life. They submitted to a bunch of rules and regulations that they had set for themselves. And I think that if you just treat a bunch of rules and regulations, that's a good way to toe failure. You know it's a good way to set yourself up to fail. Rather, if you create a lifestyle where writing and marketing and being an entrepreneur are just more of a natural lifestyle for you, where you're not so much. You know, you don't have like this inter voice in your head where you're shaking your finger at yourself and say, You need to do this. You need to do that where it's just something where you're stepping out of there. You're not listening to that voice, and you're just doing what comes natural. And if you're a writer, you are going to want to write. You know it's it's going to come natural to you. In those quiet times when you have times a load, you're probably going to find yourself more naturally inclined to writing. So maybe instead of telling yourself, I need to write, try to find some more alone time so that that feeling comes to you. You know that inspiration comes to you and your allowing that inspiration to motivate you. And I'm not just saying, you know, don't just right when when you feel inspired, it is important to to two rights. You know, if you're going to write a book, it's important to sit down and actually right. But what I'm saying is you think thinking about it differently, having a different viewpoints about it, rather than it being like this chore that you have to do. Let it be something that's just a part of your life, you know, and the marketing as well. If you're really, really, really not feeling doing some aspect of marketing, if you really just don't feel like setting up a book, bub, add one day. In my opinion, don't do it if you really feel like just going out with some friends and hanging out or you're heading out to a new restaurant. I say, Do that. These air long term strategies All right for me, at least, this all of this stuff is a long term strategy. I've got albums I want to write. I've got movies I want to write. I got movies I want to direct. I'd like to try acting someday. You know, I want to start a band, but I've got so many things that I want to do. If I just try forcing all of that stuff, you know, in this moment it's just going to overwhelm me, and I'm not gonna want to do any of it. So I just I personally just try to make this more of a lifestyle. You know, I do what I can when I can, and I find that that the more I get away from that nagging, you know, punitive voice in my head that that's telling me that I need to get all the should and all the rules. When I get away from that, I'm finally that Naturally, I just want to do this stuff, you know? And maybe that worked for you. Maybe it won't Who knows, finds, find what works for you and do it best. If having that nagging voice in your head is good for you, do it. You know, I'm just trying to give you a difference perspective on some of this and, like I've said about 10,000 times, keep spreadsheets to track review copies, contest submissions, ads where you've sent the book off to booksellers. Librarians. You know all that stuff. Keep spreadsheets with this information, whether it's a Google doc, whether it's excel, whatever and also keep track of your finances. The expenses do add up, especially with the ads. So if you're not keeping tabs on all this stuff, it is entirely possible for it to just spiral out of control. So make sure you have set aside a specific budget each month and stick to it, you know. All right. Now, for some warnings, make sure to avoid vanity presses or any agents that ask you to pay money to them or publishers that are asking for money. Just avoid these. You know that there are bookstores out there that will ask you to pay them ah, $100 to sell your books whenever you see si situations like this. Just if it seems too good to be true or if they're asking for money, I would say generally avoid these these people or these companies. You know, vanity press, is there gonna get they're gonna get you to sign a contract and then you're gonna have restricted rights. They're not gonna really do anything for you. Don't don't pay people to publish your books. And I don't mean like, create space or in grams spark because you are paying in drums spark to set up your files. They're not a vanity press. Vanity presses are people like I think it's Dorrance Publishing. So they'll they'll send you emails saying they want to publish your book, but you have to pay them all this morning to do it. Avoid those. Do not do those, All right, be suspicious in general of any unsolicited emails that you get just telling you how wonderful you are. And especially when those are pitching something, you know? So I hear from other authors that they get emails like this all the time where somebody said, Oh, they love your book and they want to promote it on their site. but you just have to pay X amount of money to do it. There are a lot of scammers out there who are looking to hustle people like you. They think that you're naive. They think that your ignorance and they're looking to cash in on this, this ignorance. And don't don't let him, you know, any time. If if, if you get like that. Spidey sense tingling. If you feel like something just doesn't feel right, it probably isn't right. And what you can do is check with other people about that person who sent you that email. Or you can just search online to see you know you can check websites. That's like predators and editors that will alert you to potential scammers out there and again. You know, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Don't trust website that guarantee you reviews sales or whatever anybody that's guaranteeing you something is scamming you. They're hustling you. You know there's no way to guarantee any number of sales unless they themselves. By the book. There's an ad site called Books Butterfly, which I hear tons of horror stories, not horror stories, but I get a lot of of authors or hell out of authors complaining about that website because it's it's one of those abs. Add sites like books sends or the fusty librarian. But they guarantee you a certain number of downloads. And they shouldn't do that because you can't do that. How can you guarantee a number of a certain number of downloads? And plus the site is really expensive. And when authors tried to get their money back because they haven't gotten that many downloads, the person who runs the site criticizes them and tells them that they're being negative. And you know it's their fault that they didn't sell a lot of books. And there there are scammers out there don't trust. Don't trust anybody who's guaranteeing your results and check with predators and editors and writer beware. These are reputable websites where you can look up contests or reviewers or whoever publishers there, and just to see if if those are people who have been vetted or not, see if if if they're approved or not, you know thes websites will let you know whether or not these people are people to avoid. Also, if you have a contract hire a lawyer before signing that contract. I know how much money lawyers cost. I hired a lawyer before signing my contract for developing minds. Adds, you know this. It's think about it this way. You are investing in yourself in that with that payment buying a lawyer. You are investing yourself in that if this book takes off, all right, you know that you have protected yourself against a publisher who might have been trying to take advantage of you. And so if you having that lawyer, check it out, they're gonna be working in your best interest, and they're gonna come up with terms that are agreeable for both you and your publisher or whomever. All right, So this is for people who are not self publishing their books, but are working with, like, a small press, maybe definitely have a lawyer review your contract it You don't want people to push your around there. There are so many people in this world who are going to try to take advantage of you. You gotta fight back. You cannot let these people do this to you. You know, it's it's not just it's not just bad for your financial. It's just bad for your spirit. You know, it's bad for your soul. You gotta put up boundaries and you gotta fight back. And that doesn't mean you know, any time somebody is offering you a contract that you should start screaming at them and hurling like your feces at them and tell you to go to hell. You know, just just I'm just telling you to be aware that there are people out there who are do not have good intentions. You don't need to live in fear. Just do your due diligence check on these people before signing anything. Check it out. You know, and be aware of how you interact with people and you don't want a bad reputation. It is many, you know, publishers. As there are out, there is many add websites and everything out there there are out. There is many librarians of bookstores. It's a small world, you know. And if you start to get a bad reputation, people are not going to want to buy your books. They're not gonna want to hire you for a better not do not want to book you for events. They're not gonna want to interact with you. You know, if if you start acting like a like a jerker and deVeau, whatever, nobody's gonna want to interact with you. So just keep that in mind. It's It's something I heard about Hollywood long, though a friend of mine who's a producer, just you got a Z. Many people is there are in Hollywood. It's a small town, and if you are causing problems that is going to spread very quickly, so always, just always make sure that you're, you know, being professional. Oh, and this is something to hear. Make sure to register a copyright for your work. Don't just mail it to yourself in an unsealed envelope that that's called the poor man's copyright. It is not gonna hold up in court. Don't do that, All right, I know I copied a K. I know that I covered this information in the copyrights video, but if you did not watch that one, make sure that you register a copyright for your books. If you're in the US at least, and this way, you'll protect your work and you'll be able to hire a lawyer. Should there ever be a case where you need to hire a lawyer, and that lawyer will be more likely to take your case because they will get their their fees reimbursed. If you know if if you win that suit so or whatever case you're you're bringing up, So if you're just mailing it to yourself, that doesn't mean anything. You know you already. You already technically in the US have copyright to your work. When you finish writing it, the copyrights that you register that just register is the fact that it's that it is. It is yours as of this date, you know, And that enables you to be able to get reimbursement for your lawyer fees, mailing it to yourself. It doesn't do anything. It's just a waste of time and money, so don't do that. All right, I've got some recommendations here for you. So these are some people that I recommend you to follow their influencers in these self publishing community. So one of these air the some of the biggest people here, So I've already mentioned Mark Dawson. This Joanna Pen, Tim Groll, Jane Friedman, Joe Frank Friedlander, Kendall preneurs. It's a website Europe, blawg and the Facebook Group that I continue to reference is called 20 books to 50 k It is a massive group of people on Facebook, and it's a very supportive group of people who are just trying to help one another to boost sales as much as possible. This is keep in mind, that's Ah, Facebook group that is dedicated to helping writers to make the most money for their books . So it's not necessarily one about writing books. It's more geared towards the marketing aspect of books. So if you want to find one that yeah, if that it is more about writing books, I'm sure there's a Facebook group out there for you, right? Here's some recommended reading. Four. Writing These Air Some books I already recommended previously, but self editing for fiction Writers by Dave King and Ready Brown. The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr and E. B. White. Make Your Words Work by Gary Provost. Keys to Great Writing by Stephen Wilbur's on writing Well, by William Sensor and on Writing by Stephen King and then for screenwriting, which I'm gonna cover next. Briefly. The Screenwriter's Bible by David Trottier by David Trotter I don't his trotter atrocity Trottier, but this This is the book that I would start with if you're interested in screenwriting, because this book is going to tell you how to format your your script, it's gonna tell you information about how to write good three act structure. I mean, it's just it's pretty much got all the information that you need to get you up and running as a screenwriter, and then you can get into the others because those go into story structure and things like that. With more Death like Story by Robert McKee I would highly recommend that one. And if you are seeing the movie adaptation, that guy who's yelling at Charlie Kaufman at the end or, you know Nick Nicolas Cage at the end, that is Robert McKee, not not paid, played by Robert McKee. But that's that's who the you know that is being portrayed in that film, and so that's a huge book that a lot of people have read. I've read it. It's great adventures Not supposed to be. Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman Making a good script Great By Linda Seger I haven't read Lou Hunters screenwriting for 34 but I've heard a lot of people recommend it . And I've met Lou Hunter and he's just a Titan in the screenwriting community. So check out his book. I'm sure it's great. The Anatomy of Story by John Truby. I've read that one, and I recommend it and screenplay by sit field. I didn't read this one, but I do hear a lot of great things about it. So all right, recommended reading for book creation and marketing. I would check out the essential Guide to getting your book published by Ariel Extra. I hope this process that right? And David Henry Steri That's a big one. But it's got so much information, and that is the one that really helps me to get a better idea of what the heck publishers do, what agents do, what's you know, what's really going on in the writing community. I didn't really know very much of anything before that. So that one if you're just like me when you when I was starting out and just want some more information, check that book out and that's that's not so much geared towards self publishing. That's that's more towards getting your book published by like a big traditional publisher , but it's got so much other information. And it's not just about that. I would check that one out and then also your 1st 1000 copies by Tim Brawl. That was one of the first books I read. It's quick, it's it's filled with great information, So check that out. How I still 30,000 e books on Amazon's Kindle by Martin Crosby I just would read that one recently, and it's got a lot of great information into, and he he continually updates that book. So he includes the most recent information in that, too. How to sell your books by the truckload on amazon dot com, But Penny Sense Aviary. I saw her speak at an event here in San Diego. She's very knowledgeable ins and nice woman, and she's she writes some great books. I would check that one out that's gonna help you to optimize your Amazon page. Promote your books by Patricia Fry. That's got a ton of great strategies to help you to promote your books. You know, a lot of them are very cheap. The free strategies and there are some really great ones in there, So check that book out. Uh, another author. This is Chris Fox. I've read some of his books. There's one called right to market. There's one that I'm reading. Currently, it's called the six Figure author. Their small books. You could probably get through them quickly, but he's got quite a following. Okay, so next I am going to give you a bonus section on screenwriting. Now, what this is intended to do, if that could be a really in depth like shot, how to and all like the theory and all that on screen writing. This is just going to help you to get up and running. I'm gonna give you the basics for how to write a screenplay. So this will help you to turn your book or any other idea that you have into a screenplay. All right, so stick around. If you're interested in that, and I'll see you next time, and and if you don't stick around, then this is gonna be it. You know, so thank you for for watching my lecture series. And I hope that this has been useful to you. And I hope it's you. If if you did like the course, I hope that you leave a good review if you If you don't like the course, please let me know what it is that you don't like about it. So this way I can make changes to this in the future. And again, hope every great day. And I wish you the best of luck. 44. Screenwriting 101: The Basics for How to Turn your Book into a Great Screenplay: All right, Welcome back to from first draft of bestseller I'm John Glaucoma and today we're gonna discuss screenwriting. All right, so what is a screenplay? A screenplay is a blueprint for film. Now, pretty much any film that you have seen. Most films, at least have got a screenplay that were written for them. So a screen and a screenwriter writes a screenplay, and then a producer and a director become interested in in turning that screenplay into a movie. And that's that's pretty much how the process goes. And the director may make changes. The producer may make changes to that script, but it all starts from that screenplay. And once, once the producer options or buys that script that no longer belongs to the writer, it now belongs to that production studios, so they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. But it starts with that idea. It starts with that screenplay, So I I personally think that screenwriters are, you know, probably the most importance people in Hollywood. Clearly, I am going to be biased by that cause I I write screenplays, but to me it's just I mean, everything starts with screenplay, everything the world starts with screenplay, the setting, the thematic material, though the action, the pacing for the story, the characters. All of that starts in the screenplay. Now directors absolutely can bring that screenplay toe life, and they can trim things they can. You know they could make sure that certain material is brought through when others is more muted. But it starts with that screenplay. So again I'm biased. But I think screenwriters really deserve I think they're the ones that deserve a $20 million paychecks, Not the Tom Cruise is, and screenplays are structure, All right, so with a novel, you can you know you can sprawl a little bit with the book, you can kind of stretch your wings and go for a go for a ride with screenplays. It's all about structure. You just want to make sure you're writing the important information and just cutting, cutting everything else out. You know, get to the point crap and get off the pot and then get on to your next story. Alright, but we'll talk about what? What structure is, too? And on Lee, right? What can be seen on camera? So that's another thing that's different than novel writing or just just writing a book is that in a book, you can write people's thoughts, but in a screenplay, we don't know what's going on in the person's head. You could only write what people can actually see. So if we have a character who is bit deep in thought, we have to show this somehow we can't say all the characters. You know he's thinking about this in this in this, if the character is thinking about his ex wife, maybe he's looking at a picture of his ex wife. And that's how we see that on screen, you know, So keep that in mind. You can only write what can be seen and only right what's important. You know, again, this is Scream Place our structure. We've got our I don't want to just limited by saying three X structure. There are different numbers of acts, you know. It's five x seven act so but you only want to write what's important. You only have a certain number of pages to tell this story in again and books you've got plenty of space. You can write as much as you want, but in cinema movie theaters. They're trying to get as many people in and out of the theater as they can each day. So they're gonna prefer toe, have movies that are shorter in length because and they can. They can show that movie more times and they can make more money. And so that that's why you see, there's a push in Hollywood to keep movies to about like an hour and 1/2 you know, more or less to two hours. It's It's in part because of that, and also because it costs a lot of money that it costs more to make a longer film. So this way this is why you want to only write what's important, keep it trim and keep this story moving. And your dialogue and action should have a purpose and move this story forward. Now. I know you're probably thinking right now you could probably think of some examples maybe maybe before sunrise or Quentin Tarantino's films, but you know, a lot of those they're just they're just driven by dialogue. But what what I just said. They're driven by dialogue. That dialogue is doing something. You know that that dialogue is telling us more about the character. That dialogue is telling us more about that. The theme. If you look at a movie like our film, like my dinner with Andre, that's pretty much entirely talking. It's two guys having a conversation for the whole film, you know. But that dialogue moves the story forward. You don't want to just have people talking about whatever just because it sounds cool, you don't keep the story going forward. And one day, when you are asses popular is quitting. Tarantino. You can, you know you can write whatever the heck you want and see if people will respond to it. But until then, just keep things moving. On average, scripts are 90 to 120 pages, but that 120 pages number while it used to be, you know, a pretty standard number now, you know, most most production studios they're not. They don't want to see scripts that are longer than like 105 to 110 pages again for reasons that I previously had mentioned. So if you can keep your story even between like 85 to 105 pages, that's probably for the best. You know, comedies tend to be shorter. Drums tend to be longer. SciFi tend to be a little bit longer. So and one pages approximately one minute of screen time. You don't want to give suggestions for the actors or directors. For example, you don't want to tell the director how to cut a scene. You know, a dissolve or wipe or whatever. You don't want to have necessarily tell actors how to how to act If there's some important thing that they need to do, you want to let them know about that. But you don't necessarily want to tell them how to act certain scenes. You know, you gotta let them do that themselves and don't and transitions like the cut twos or dissolves or whatever formatted correctly. This is huge when I write. So I first started writing screenplays. I wrote a screenplay with my friend in college, and we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. We had no idea about structure we had no idea about about formatting. We just started writing a script, you know, with with character dialogue tags and and that was it. But I had learned along the way that there's a specific format that Hollywood uses there. Just just film producers in in general use for scripts, and you want to stick with that format. If you don't use that format, they will think that you are not professional. If they think that you're not professional, then they're not going to want to buy your scripts or work with you. So make sure the formatted correctly, and you can find out how to format a script in that book of the screenwriter's Bible. So start with that one screenwriter's Bible. That's gonna be your guide. Use all caps for the first time. You meet a character and then just keep, you know, just just just put that first letter in title case from their on and that that includes, even if you're referring using a pronoun or if you're if you're referring to like you know , the waiter or whatever you want to keep that first letter capitalized after you have already put their name in all caps, which is weird. But that's just the Hollywood thing. And use great descriptions to introduce characters. Don't use stereotypes. Use good descriptions to let us know who that character is just from a sentence or two, you know, and this is there's an art in this, but you don't want to. You don't want to spend a paragraph introducing someone. Let's try to in a sentence or two lets us know who this person is. And also sluglines those that's just ah, piece of screenwriting shark jargon. And I'm gonna show you what those are changed those whenever the camera moves. So just for you to visualize, you're gonna change a slugline. Anytime. Somebody has to physically pick up the camera and move it to another area. And I'm gonna show you how to do this here using a piece of software called Final Draft. So I use Final draft. That's the industry standard. If you're going to get one piece of software to format your screenplays, if you're serious about it, I would just buy final draft and these programs. They format the script for you, and they do a lot more so So I missed that part there, or you could buy movie magic. That's pretty much the same thing as final draft. It's not. It's not like a standard in the industry, but it is it is very widely used. So you pick that up. Or Celtics, which is free. That's a program that you can just download from the Internet and use. All right, now we're gonna do a sample seen. I'm going to use final drafts to create a scene. And how about we just do Let's just do a scene of me teaching this course. All right, So this is final draft here, all right? And this is and this is the title bar up here. This is all the stuff that you can you know all the different views you can use for it. But I'm just gonna keep it to this basic one. When you hit return, this elements box comes up and see how they've got short. You know, little, little quick ways you could do this if you just type s that'll give you a scene heading or we're looking right now for a transition, because you always you always start your strips with faded, and it just populates there so you could just hit Enter. All right, so we're fading in from black now. Here we are. We're entering our story world. We want to create a slugline. so I've been hit Answer again. I'm gonna hit s for seeing heading. And then four sluglines you could either do exterior or interior. I'm gonna do interior. And as you saw as you start the type that you could just hit Tab and it will automatically put that in and I'm going to do Let's see my bedroom dash John le Pumas Apartment Day. All right, so the main things that you're including here, it's either do interior or exterior. This is an interior scene. Exterior scenes like stuff that our film outside that would be exterior and you want to go from specific to more general here. So here here is the bedroom in John Lymphomas apartment. Now this This can be done in a number of different ways. This is just the way that I have over the years have come to do it. It's just to me it's a good way of doing this and making things as clear as possible for people who read the script. And then you just want to put day or night here. Don't get cute here. Don't put dawn or twilight or whatever. Just put day or night, even if its interior just put day or night. So this is my scene right now. I am here in my bedroom, in my apartment. His answer. And that's I don't know if it automatically goes to a yes. That oughta make automatically goes to an action elements. So if you had answer again, just hit a for action. We wanted action element action lines. So you want to keep action lines between 1 to 4 lines in total action lines are going to tell the reader what's actions air happening in your story so I can type here award winning screenwriter John La Poma, and then he could put the age. Unfortunately, I am going to reveal that to you and just typing that myself makes me makes me weep a little bit Inside 34 30 started 35 and maybe, with heavy bags under his eyes and dirty hurt and used tissues by his feet. That tells us just a little bit more about to this this guy here, award winning screenwriter John the poem, a 35 with heavy bags under his eyes and used tissues by his feet. So clearly we know he's probably tired and he's maybe sick types at his computer. All right, so then what we can do is we can add a dialog box. I'm sorry. Character bucks. So hit, Enter again and hit, See for character. And then this automatically capitalizes. It's doing the formatting for you. So we automatically capitalize that character and then hit Enter again and that will automatically set you up into a dialogue box. So now this is this is a dialogue element here. So any of this stuff, this is something that this character is actually going to say on screen. So let's just say I am being myself right now and speaking to all of you. Hi. And welcome back to from first draft to best seller today. We're going to be discussing screenwriting. Boom. All right, so this this is anything that this character says it's gonna show up here. So another system keys Here. You want to keep this, Keep this moving along. You know, don't just have a person just talking to themselves about nothing. Make sure that the dialogue is doing something and that it's moving the story forward. And that doesn't mean it has to be short. If you look at Goodwill hunting Some of the best dialogue, and that film comes from from really long passages. If if you look at some of Charlie Kaufman's films, there are some passages with huge amounts dialogue, so having a lot of dialogue isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it should be doing something for your story. All right, all right. So if you want to create like a voice over here, you could just hit a parenthesis E, and then you could do a voice over or off screen. So if we did this OS, that means offscreen. That means that this character is saying this off of the screen. We're not seeing this character. We just hear their voice. If you do the oh, that's voiceover. That means that we're just we're looking at, maybe the computer screen here, and we're just hearing his voice. So let's get rid of this, though, all right? And then we say the Poma tries not to move as to avoid making his chair squeak, which would drive his students crazy. And that is something I'm doing right now, and it is hurting my back. I could take a different share here, but I am not the brightest person. So the Poma tries not to move as to avoid making his chair squeak, which would drive his students crazy. And so we can, you know, if we don't want to say something like his back hurts. What we want to do is we want to show how his his back hurts. So the Poma grabs his back. Let's just say the coma grubs his lower back and grimaces. All right, so now we see we've got, you know, we faded in. So that's just a standard thing. Just fade in whenever you start a new new script, and that's pretty much the only time you should use. Transitions are for fade in and fade out. And so, like, let's say this is done. Let's do our transition fade out. That's that shows that were at the end of our script here, all right, So again, main things don't do transitions other than fade in and fade out. Your slug lines are gonna tell if we're interior or exterior where we're located and every day or night and we won't wanna put to like, you know, he's he's he's typing at his computer in his apartment in New York City. You know, to let let people know where this is taking place as well. So we want to keep this toe 1 to 4 lines. If we have more than that, break it up. Also, when there's a new like beat, say, for example, you know these type again, it's computer. And then he sniffles. Let's put the he sniffles on a difference line because this is a new beat. It's like a new action. So we want to break that up, all right, and you don't have to get cute here. Don't don't be like you know you don't have to be Shakespeare when you're writing these just be directed to the point. Just just go straight to what it is that's going on, so you don't have to necessarily be super specific here. I'm sorry you don't have to be necessarily very verbose. Just tell people what's happening, all right? And just tell people what's important about the scene. As I said here, he's got used tissues at his feet. That's important. But what I'm not telling you about is maybe What's what. Posters, air hanging on the walls? I'm not telling you about what it looks like outside, because maybe that doesn't that is not important to this story. Knew the tissues Being at his feet are important because we're showing that he's sick and that's gonna come into play in the story. If there is a gun on his computer desk and that's going to come into the story, right, there's a gun on his computer desk. You know, if if somebody is, you know, if there somebody shouting outside and that's going to come into this play into this story , you can write. He sniffles. His his neighbor, Steve, shouts outside. You know. So let's let's say that I see this. This is a guy. He's sick. He's feeling tired and he's typing at his computer. He sniffles and his neighbor is shouting outside, so maybe this is going to distract him. All right, this this shouting. If the Shari doesn't have anything to do with your story deleted, you know, this is where you have to know. You have to know your story in and out. You have to know what it is you're trying to say with your story and then just include what is important there All right. And so this is just a little you know, this is a very brief way of showing you how to to set up your screenplay. It's safe. If we're gonna then go outside. Let's say he wants to talk to his friend outside. Let's just create another slugline because we're gonna have to physically pick the camera up and move it outside to shoot this scene. Exterior. John Lymphomas Apartment day. So now he's gonna go. John Le Poma rushes outside with a baseball bat in hands. Boom! All right, See, right there with the baseball bat in hands that's telling us a lot. Maybe he's pissed off. That is, his neighbor is shouting and he's gonna go out there and he's gonna do something about it. Now this this is you know what we're building character were establishing John the Poma as a you know, a sick rage, a holic who maybe is is psychotic in some way and what we're building that, you know, by by his actions, he's rushing outside with a baseball bat in hand. It also tells us maybe about the relationship between him and his neighbor. Maybe maybe we find that when he rushes outside with the baseball bat in hat in his hand. Steve Steve tosses him a pitch. You know, maybe maybe he's actually going outside to play baseball. Maybe he's taking a break from from writing, you know? So I know I'm talking to writers right now, so I don't have to get to in depth with this. But again, think about character. Think about character developments. All right? And make sure you're just writing up the stuff that's important in your script. And again, this this first page here that this should be considered about one page of of this story. And one thing I do too. I never in terms of structure for stories. I've written 11 screenplays now, and I don't necessarily think about them in terms of, like, a set structure what I do, I've pretty much always I've started with an ending, and I thought to myself, How does this character get to the place that they're in now and then inherent in that is 33 act structure. You know, if we're gonna have a change, if we're gonna go from a beginning to an end, we're gonna have a middle in there. You know. So that's I think the simplest way to think about this is if you're if you're taking a character and changing that character, you're gonna have three act structure in there. So the keys, though, is try to keep the first act under, you know, about 30 pages, keep it to about 25 to 30 35 pages. And in that first act, what you could do typically is you've got a character who, his life, her life is going in one way. You know, it's it's kind of settled into a comfortable situation in their life, but they're not happy. And then some outside force comes in and kind of shuffles things up. And then in that first back, that character. So I don't say in that first act, that character has to make a decision. Do they? Do they do they act on this this shuffling up that's going on or do they not? And how are they going to act on it? You know, So it's safer exempt. We've got Spider Men, right? Tobey Maguire. He gets bitten by a radioactive spider. That's the shuffling up there. You know his life is normal and then all of a sudden he gets bitten by this spider. We spend the first act of him kind of exploring his new, his new powers. But then he has to make a decision. You know, it's his. His uncle gets killed. And then at that point, he makes that decision that he is going to. He is going to protect people. He's gonna use his power to help people. He's not going to use his power to, you know, to exploit people. And so he's made a decision, and then for the rest of the film he is, he is, you know, at that point of no turning back, he's now fighting the Green Goblin and and as the the conflict grows and builds, he his his learned that he learns more and more about himself until finally, he has to use what he's learned about himself to either defeat the Green Goblin or to be defeated by him himself, you know, so that's pretty typical structure there. There could be stories that don't necessarily follow that structure, like leaving Las Vegas, where Nicholas Cage, he's hell bent on killing himself by drinking himself to death, and we see that that doesn't change throughout the story. You know, we might. There are times when we might think that, Hey, this guy is going to stop doing this, but he just keeps doing it. And then what changes are people around him like Elizabeth Shoe. She changes, and we as an audience change, so you don't necessarily have to have a main character who changes. But there's gotta be some change going out. Maybe there's a change to the world that people live in. Maybe that there's a change to some secondary character. Maybe this is just a change in general to the people who are watching it, you know, they've learned something about themselves. So just think about screenplays like that who changes what changes and then show what things were like in the beginning and then show how that thing changes by the end. And I think if you just think about it like that, it's gonna make the whole thing really easy. And, you know, in the second act, things typically go well at first until the protagonist gets ah, setback. And at this point, you know, the protagonists realizes that that life isn't gonna be all that easy. And so they have to kind of double down on their efforts to either continue to try to improve or to just give up. And then eventually they're gonna have to use what they've learned to fight. That that's antagonised. And then after that, comes the resolution. So again, you guys know story structure, so I don't have to get into it to to in depth with you. But just keep in mind with screenplays. You want that you want toe really? State, stick to that structure. Okay, Now that you have created the next best screenplay, you've typed it up. It's formatted correctly. You've proofread it. And also just a tip here too. When you're editing, do a couple of different passes for edits, maybe do one at it for what you're looking for. Character development. Do another edit where you're looking to strengthen the thematic material of the tone. Do another at it where you're just proof reading. All right, this way. You don't overwhelm yourself by trying to do everything at once, but now you've done that. Now what? You could enter your script in competitions on a website called Film Freeway. So check that out It's just a It's a great site where you upload your your screenplay and you can submit it to any number of competitions. You can also get on Stage 32 the Happy Writers, and you could pitch your script to agents or producers. I would maybe hold off a this stage on doing that. You want to make sure that everything is as polished as possible before you submit material to them. So you might want to submit it to some competitions first, to see what people say about it. Or if you're part of a writer's group, see what people are saying about it there and then a 10 film festivals. Get out there and meet people. Meat producers meet directors, meet other writers. This is This is how I have met a number of great people. I've met people who have won awards at Sundance. You know, I've met people who who are who are assistance toe movie stars. You know, I've met a lot of of people out there just by attending film festivals. I drove ah, Sundance winning director home from a film festival in my car, you know, So it's a great way to meet people. I've met some friends who have gone on to do some big things in Hollywood, and these are people who I am, you know, friends with their people, who I call up just to go hang out with. These people have met at film festivals, so get out there and a 10 film festivals network and just try toe be professional and half , for you can list your stripped on a website called the Black List, where you upload the script and you get feedback on this script. And depending on how well that feedback or how good that feedback is you get. The script gets ranked on the site. And so if you get a really high ranking that might entice producers or agents to to check you up, you could also listed on a website called Ink Tip, where you upload your script and you upload your logline and synopsis. And if it people who are you know, producers air searching for scripts, they can they can your might show up in in a search that they're looking for, and then they can check out your logline and then potentially request to the script. You also want to get up on Get up on the network. I s a of the International Screenwriters Association. And so here it's the same thing producers and agents or whoever they can search for your script. Once you get it up on the website and you can announce success stories that you have could find competitions. It is a paid for service, just like blacklisting. Tip those you have to pay for. You have to pay for the happy writers pitches, but I to me it's It's been very, very useful. Movie bites. This is another website you pay for a subscription, you can list your scripts and their contest wins, and it shows you the ranking of your script on that site. And I have got a script that is that is ranked number one out of like, thousands of scripts in a couple of categories. All right, and I think it's ranked number four in a couple other big ones. They're number three is like the third ranked genre or drama on the website, just like almost 3000 scripts on there. So this is this is a great site toe help you to get more MAWR publicity for your screenwriting efforts and just it's a great place where you can meet people as well and then update your website as well. So update your website with synopsis of your screenplays. And if any contest wins, you have any positive blurbs you get from reviewers and, you know, just just keep just keep updating things and keep getting yourself out there. Update your social media. What I do is whenever I win a competition, I let people on my social media No. And now you might be thinking I will. This that's probably drives people crazy, and maybe it does drive people crazy, but the benefits of having done that are far outweighing. You know of the drawbacks in that I have. I've been approached by a number of different directors and producers because they keep seeing the fact that I'm listening that my script just won this competition or my script was the grand jury prize winner of this. And you know those semi messages. Hey, do you have a script like this? Hey, I'm interested in in in hiring you tip for this project, and I have I have gotten jobs as a result of doing this directly as a result of them say, Hey, I keep seeing that you're posting all these winds and I thought, I check out your work, you know, So the world is changing very rapidly. Don't don't limit yourself and don't don't exclude yourself from some great opportunities just because you're not doing things like updating your social media, you could write press releases when you win awards and submit those you can query agents and managers. I just entered my or in November, I entered by one of my scripts in a pitch it session a prominence. Agents at a prominence agency in Hollywood read my my pitch, and he liked it. And so I emailed him and let him know that the script was done. And you know what? Would you like to read it? And he's not taking on new clients right now, but I've just established a relationship with a huge major player in Hollywood, you know, so find ways of of getting in touch with agents and managers and all that and be creative with it. But don't be annoying, be professional. When he said he's not looking for people, I just said thanks, no problem. But in the future, maybe he will be looking for people. And I can query him again, you know? So all right. And then recommended books. I already told you about these. And then next here, rinse and repeat. What I mean by this is now you've learned all these great strategies for for writing, and then, you know, some for screenwriting. All you get to do is take these strategies and then apply them to new projects and keep doing it and keep writing. And I I can't guarantee that she'll be successful, but you're going to increase your chances of being successful by creating high quality, beautiful pieces off writing that people are gonna want to read. You know, if you just keep putting great content out there, it's going to find an audience eventually. And I do think that you're going to likely be successful or increase your chances of being successful. All right, so rinse and repeat, take what I've taught you. Take what you've learned yourselves and apply that to new projects. And I do believe that, you know, if you do this that someday you will you will accomplish your goals as a writer. You know, you may have toe recalibrate those goals from time to time, but I think that when you're when you keep investing in yourself and your craft, you will come out on top eventually. All right. So good luck to you. I hope that this has been useful again. If if if you have enjoyed this lecture, Siri's please consider leaving a positive review. And if there's anything that you haven't lights, please let me know. And I would love to hear from useless weaken, improve the the videos and lecture series accordingly. All right, so good luck to you. I hope that you are all very successful. I hope that you have more success than I do and, you know, keep writing. 45. Conclusion : congratulations for completing from first drafted bestseller. I hope that this strategies and the lessons that you've learned in this course have already been useful to you. I hope that you've been following along and that you know now how to create your book to get that Blur published or to get that blurb on your book. Teoh for about the book at the book. I hope that you were able to publish your book on all of the stores like Amazon and iBooks , and I hope that you've already started marketing your book and already seeing success. And so I would like to let you know two in this section about a few services that I offer. And so, if you would like one on one consultations with any writing questions that you have, please check out my websites www dot john le poma dot com for the current rates for that. And so you know, give me a phone call or we can do like a video Chet, and I'll answer any writing questions. You have now be writing questions for novel writing, just just pros in general or screenwriting. Also, I offer script doctor services for screenwriters So check out my website, www dot john le poma dot com, as well for current rates and more information about that. And please sign up for my mailing list as well. I'm gonna include a link at the at the description section for this this section of the course so you can find a link there and sign up for my mailing list where you will receive discounts on any future courses or services that I provide by joining that list. Okay. And so and also I have included a link to where you can see my the auto sequence emails that I send to my subscribers so you can click on that as well. So I've got two links under this. This are in this section. There's one where you can see the auto sequences and there's one where you can just join my mailing list. All right, So again, I hope that's the strategies that you use for this course. You're applying those and they're helping you to achieve your goals as a writer and again in the the These strategies air best applied when there are used their more successful for you when they are used for more than one book. So I would encourage you to write more books and to apply these strategies for those future books as well. So, again, I wanted to thank you for trusting me. Teoh lead you on this journey for you to take your manuscript to a potential best seller. And please feel free to keep in touch with me. And let me know of any successes that you've had. Let me know any strategies that have worked for you. Which ones happens and let me know, too, about anything that you would like to see. That would be an improvement for this course. So thank you again for trusting me to lead you on this journey. And I wish you the best of luck with your writing career. And let's keep in touch. Thank you.