$5k+/Month Self-Publishing. Happy to Share and Help

[Cyberseraph]

Links are as follows:
http://antiwantrepreneur.com/aw-podcast-016-peter-arnott/
http://joshuaisaak.com/how-pete-arnott-started-a-5k-per-month-passive-cashflow-business-on-amazon/

Guys, most of the questions he answered in his interviews.
I listened to both of them today and I can highly recommend them.

Pete, will you record your webinar and make the video available?

 

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[ped89]

Guys, most of the questions he answered in his interviews.
I listened to both of them today and I can highly recommend them.

Pete, will you record your webinar and make the video available?

Thanks for that! Appreciate it - was pretty f**king nervous doing them haha

Yup I will be recording the webinar.
In interest of being totally open - webinar is first piece of launch content for the course. Not here to pitch it to you guys and gals though, just here to help the fastlaners as I've learned tonnes of AMA's in the past.

 

[Selfy]

In interest of being totally open - webinar is first piece of launch content for the course.

Yeah, I think most people were on to that the moment you put the links. lol

Not knocking your hustle OP, it made me reminisce of my warriorforum days, but be wary of posting your links here from TOS.

 

[Selfy]

As I said, I'm not knocking the hustle (never hate the game, gents), as I'm sure i'll learn something from your course.

Do you have a module list already developed?

I want to see what you have in terms of market researching the categories.

 

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[Selfy]

Would need to research the market before I could answer that, I don't publish randomly - I research the marketplace and make sure it seem that there is a high liklihood of it being successful.

They are going to be very short, I'm going to target Amazons new "short reads" categories and build out short stories that are 15 minute reads. Means I can lower the cost per book, build out an email list with each book (which helps the next releases be more popular) and also dominate a certain niche by having my pen-name everywhere in that niche .

Hope that helps

Bro, have you even read @Held for Ransom he's a dude (stickied thread on top) who has triple your earnings, same time frame, and thats what he has. I think the Fiction market had been covered in this forum.

But what you are doing in NON-FICTION is something else. How you make 5k from non-fiction? Now that's key info. (Non-Fiction has a longer shelf life and higher price point)

$5,000/20 Non-Fiction = 250 sales/month on your 20 Non fiction titles. That's impressive. you must have top notch market research. I hope it's coming from books other than howtomakemoneyonkindle.

 

[Jonleehacker]

I prefer to just keep it within Amazon and let them do most of the work - if you do your targeting correctly then it will promote your books for you

Can you break this down. Explain what exactly "do your targeting correctly" means, step by step.

thx.

 

[A.I. Woods]

could someone right a book say to harbor info? like an idea would be to talk to a bunch of old folks all over and just to tell it like it is and how things used to be and what this generation could learn from it then time capsule it in the form of a book...and just sell it as "info book". it would need formatting and research of course.

also can young people right books? I have alot of experience with the general public and I would like to publish it.

Hey James! As a young person, you can make money on Kindle as well. I started writing books for Kindle over the summer, about three months ago, and I am already earning a monthly passive income of about $800. Not to be cocky or anything, but I consider myself to be a great writer, at least in comparison to many of the other writers of my age group. I am 15 by the way. I don't consider my results to be amazing, as there are people who are earning more than me, and others who are earning less than me. But as a teen, writing eBooks on subjects that you know about can be a great way to earn money.

 

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[COSenior]

Marketing - I do 90% of my marketing on Amazon, I let them do it for me basically... I "launch" my books so that they rocket up the Amazon charts and then Amazon does the promotion like puttin them in the "hot new releases" and in email blasts n shit.

I'm curious about the specifics of this statement. Are you actually doing paid Amazon advertising, or simply leveraging their promotional practices? If the latter, would you have any idea how to do that for fiction? What do you mean by 'launch'? No need to discuss how 'rocketing up the Amazon charts' translates to Amazon promotion; I think we're all familiar with that. But what to do to launch that rocket would be very helpful.

 

[Jamesdoesmith]

Hey James! As a young person, you can make money on Kindle as well. I started writing books for Kindle over the summer, about three months ago, and I am already earning a monthly passive income of about $800. Not to be cocky or anything, but I consider myself to be a great writer, at least in comparison to many of the other writers of my age group. I am 15 by the way. I don't consider my results to be amazing, as there are people who are earning more than me, and others who are earning less than me. But as a teen, writing eBooks on subjects that you know about can be a great way to earn money.

Dang dude that is awesome! I am an ok writer its the orginization. My last name is Poe..like the author. So how did you get started? what sparked it? Did you follow a guide? For proportions that's about 3/4 th my day job check when I am not selling.

 

[redshep]

This is only my opinion. I hope the OP's offer is great.

But my experience is this is an outsourced pump and dump "model", like Kindle Money Mastery, etc. I call it pump and dump because these ghostwritten books straddle the fence between mildly helpful and junk. They're short, cheap, and say just enough to call it a book, but not enough to be genuinely helpful, nor anger people enough to ask for their $2 back. You typically invest $1000-$3000 to create 20 or so small books, include a copycat cover, clickbait title, email opt-in and related affiliate links in the book's text and cross sell them against each other.

Here it is broken down:
1) Pick a big market with sales, like fitness, make money, dating, etc.
2) Niche down a level for your "angle", like women who want to lose weight fast for their wedding day.
3) Find the current best selling kindle titles, then look at the reviews. Find the most-highlighted passages and be sure to include those, then take the advice from the negative reviews and fix those problems in your book.
4) Go to elance, odesk, epicwrite, etc. and post the job outline.
5) Ask that the writer have experience in your target niche, be American, Canadian, British, etc. and can communicate over skype. Create payment tiers to monitor quality. As they submit each part, review for quality and continue job. Repeat for book cover.
6) Publish book with a clickbait title like "Wedding Day Goddess: How to lose 15lbs in 4 weeks with delicious meals, intermittent fasting and zero exercise"
7) Start a blog. Fill out the blog with 50-100 free niche articles and have email opt-in for blog updates/ some freebie like an ebook of your blog's future greatest hits, etc. Collect and manage emails with autoresponder.
8) Put the landing page link in the first couple of pages in all your books, and list all your other books + books that are coming soon in the last pages of each one.
9) Over time, the email list grows. When you have a new book, you can run a promotion, email your list and ask them to leave a review. Theoretically, a sharp jump in new book sales pushed the title up the rankings and, coupled with a large number of reviews, will get the "amazon juice" to bump your organic search rank, and things will start to compound.
10) When sales start to slide, take a screenshot of your highest monthly earnings and build a $500 course around earning 1K on the side.

I'm not saying that everything in there is wrong. But as a system, it's rarely sustainable. And if you aren't willing to put your name on a nonfiction title, you're not making good enough content to be proud of or being honest with the reader.

 

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[Yeezy]

If I have no writing experience what re some steps I could take to go down the road of self publishing?

For example I understand there is a big health market, would it to be fair play to research this topic on google and then compile information in my own words into a book?

 

[A.I. Woods]

Dang dude that is awesome! I am an ok writer its the orginization. My last name is Poe..like the author. So how did you get started? what sparked it? Did you follow a guide? For proportions that's about 3/4 th my day job check when I am not selling.

1.) How did I get started? Well, I had been writing small books ever since I was just 7, but had never had the persistence to ever see one through until the end. Then, when my parents refused to let me get a traditional job, I decided to take matters into my own hands. That's when I began searching for ways to make money online, and tried nearly everything that is available (YouTube, GPT sites, article writing sites - you name it, I've done it). Finally, I stumbled upon Amazon Kindle. After publishing several books, I saw that my efforts were almost immediately rewarded (first sale after just a few days from time of publishing). That's when I saw that this could turn into something greater, and I've been trying to upscale this opportunity ever since.

2.) What sparked it? I needed money, both for right now, and for any business ventures I might do in the future. So, I wrote, and ignored my body's cries for rest (some nights I was up until 3am, just shooting away at my keyboard). The money gradually came, and even better, I actually enjoyed writing the books!

3.) Did you follow a guide? Nope. There are many free resources available all over the web regarding Amazon's Kindle platform. One great place to find these resources is on YouTube. Also, I joined many author groups on Facebook, and got quite a bit of help and inspiration from them along the way. But, after it was all said and done, I knew that it was up to me, and just wrote.

 

[ped89]

As I said, I'm not knocking the hustle (never hate the game, gents), as I'm sure i'll learn something from your course.

Do you have a module list already developed?

I want to see what you have in terms of market researching the categories.

Yeah - I wasn't here to pitch Fastlaners. I hope thats clear, just here to try and give value. But PM if you're interested and I can talk to you there.
Uhhuuuuh modules are all developed - videos are all recording and content is all done.

 

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[ped89]

Can you break this down. Explain what exactly "do your targeting correctly" means, step by step.

thx.

Sure. Happy too, won't go super deep as it would take too long to type. But basically you want to very carefully consider both your keywords and categories.
1. Categories: Amazon has hundreds upon hundreds of categories. You get to choose two per book so you have to balance the following... going niche enough that you reduce competition, not going so niche that you go into a category that has no eyeballs on it. You also want to think outside the box, so if your competition is going after a category and you feel its swamped can you think outside the box/laterally and target a related market in a diffferent category where the competition is lower. Not sure how well that was explained haha!
2. Keywords: Amazon gives you the keywords you need, hit the Kindle search bar and start typing search phrases related to your book, you want to aim for things that people are actually searching for. So on Amazon its not a "keyword" but rather "keyword phrases" try to find exactly what people are going to be typing out.

Again, not sure how well I typed that out! Not had my coffee yet so mnd is slow.

 

[ped89]

I'm curious about the specifics of this statement. Are you actually doing paid Amazon advertising, or simply leveraging their promotional practices? If the latter, would you have any idea how to do that for fiction? What do you mean by 'launch'? No need to discuss how 'rocketing up the Amazon charts' translates to Amazon promotion; I think we're all familiar with that. But what to do to launch that rocket would be very helpful.

Ya ya, let me explain what I mean.

Leveraging their promotional practices. For fiction I've done it too, got my book super high (can't remember exact position) in the erotica category, super hard to get #1 in that. Basically I wnat Amazon to put me in the "hot new releases" and email out about the new book.

Firstly, can't do paid advertising on AMazonbooks yet - they are testing the platform though, I know a few people who got in on the beta version of it.

So - instead of publishing books and then dropping them onto the free list. I like to split my KDP free days over an extended period of time usually 10-14 days, but often longer.

Promo 1 (24 hours) - Get a few honest reviews. I don't give a F*ck about what position the book is after I do this promo.
Before the next promotion I've also had my aweber sending out a review request to people who obught/downloaded the book. This gets me more social proof (reviews) so that when I move onto the next stage I have a fair few reviews.
Promo 2 (2 or 3 days) - You will see a massively increased amount of downloads as your book now has social proof. You should crack the top 100 of the free store doing this, if not you will be in the top 1000 (as long as research is done properly).
Send email out to list - tell them book is available for 0.99c just now. This helps get more buyers in very early.

Then you've either got 1 or 2 promotions left which you can use later on if the book is slipping in the charts.

hope that helps

 

[ped89]

This is only my opinion. I hope the OP's offer is great.

But my experience is this is an outsourced pump and dump "model", like Kindle Money Mastery, etc. I call it pump and dump because these ghostwritten books straddle the fence between mildly helpful and junk. They're short, cheap, and say just enough to call it a book, but not enough to be genuinely helpful, nor anger people enough to ask for their $2 back. You typically invest $1000-$3000 to create 20 or so small books, include a copycat cover, clickbait title, email opt-in and related affiliate links in the book's text and cross sell them against each other.

Here it is broken down:
1) Pick a big market with sales, like fitness, make money, dating, etc.
2) Niche down a level for your "angle", like women who want to lose weight fast for their wedding day.
3) Find the current best selling kindle titles, then look at the reviews. Find the most-highlighted passages and be sure to include those, then take the advice from the negative reviews and fix those problems in your book.
4) Go to elance, odesk, epicwrite, etc. and post the job outline.
5) Ask that the writer have experience in your target niche, be American, Canadian, British, etc. and can communicate over skype. Create payment tiers to monitor quality. As they submit each part, review for quality and continue job.
6) Repeat for book cover.
7) Publish book with a clickbait title like "Wedding Day Goddess: How to lose 15lbs in 4 weeks with delicious meals, intermittent fasting and zero exercise"
7) Start a blog. Fill out the blog with 50-100 free niche articles and have email opt-in for blog updates/ some freebie like an ebook of your blog's future greatest hits, etc. Collect and manage emails with autoresponder.
8) Put the landing page link in the first couple of pages in all your books, and list all your other books + books that are coming soon in the last pages of each one.
9) Over time, the email list grows. When you have a new book, you can run a promotion, email your list and ask them to leave a review. Theoretically, a sharp jump in new book sales pushed the title up the rankings and, coupled with a large number of reviews, will get the "amazon juice" to bump your organic search rank, and things will start to compound.
10) When sales start to slide, take a screenshot of your highest monthly earnings and build a $500 course around earning 1K on the side.

I'm not saying that everything in there is wrong. But as a system, it's rarely sustainable. And if you aren't willing to put your name on a nonfiction title, you're not making good enough content to be proud of or being honest with the reader.

Totally respect where you're coming from and I 100% agree that there is people who do the pump and dump model. I personally know several people with 250+ books - and I've heard of people rocking out with much higher numbers than that.

That isn't the game I'm rocking though as A) I don't see the point in being an a**hole B) It doesn't make sense to me to put out a low quality book in the knowledge that you will make a bit of money then never do anything with the book again C) Managing that many books must be a headache.

I prefer to publish quality books that have longevity to them. I don't always hit it out the park, but with many I do. And again, I agree there is a tonne of awful content out there on publishing.

This isn't my lifes work or anything, I use it to cash flow the other 2 businesses I'm involved in. You've got the process from a 30,000ft view locked down and that was a good summary - will actually help anyone who is reading this thread and wanting to dive into the area.

 

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[ped89]

If I have no writing experience what re some steps I could take to go down the road of self publishing?

For example I understand there is a big health market, would it to be fair play to research this topic on google and then compile information in my own words into a book?

Research on Amazon. Google is search market, Amazon is a buyers market -go analyse what the bestseller lists are for health.

 

[Bruh]

How do you scale quickly? How do you scale quickly without hurting quality? Do you publish your books one by one?

How do you go about finding editors? How much do you pay them?

Thanks Pete!

 

[ped89]

How do you scale quickly? How do you scale quickly without hurting quality? Do you publish your books one by one?

How do you go about finding editors? How much do you pay them?

Thanks Pete!

I do one by one, I think its easier for quality control. As you always have a 7 day window free when your writer is working it means you can work on other books, hriing writers, cover design etc. during that time.

You don't have too though, I know one crazy dude who launched like 100 at once. He did all the work upfront and then basically dominated the whole Amazon store instantlyhaha!

Scale by taking it one step at a time I would say - check out the compound effect Don't expect to get rich quick with this. Put out quality books, much better in the long run.

Find editors same way as writers or check out fiveer

 

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[Selfy]

Seems legit.

How much time do you give a ghost writer to develop a book? (ie. week)

How much are you paying the editors? Ballpark on word-count?

How much time are you devoting on market-research as opposed to finding talent? (ballpark %)

How do you make sure the ghost used unique content asides from copyscape? Do you have a process to check their work-in-progress?

Please this one: Do you have a strategy for fiction? How will you be doing fiction different than non-fiction? How will you be handling creating the plot?

Thanks!

 

[ped89]

Seems legit.

How much time do you give a ghost writer to develop a book? (ie. week)

How much are you paying the editors? Ballpark on word-count?

How much time are you devoting on market-research as opposed to finding talent? (ballpark %)

How do you make sure the ghost used unique content asides from copyscape? Do you have a process to check their work-in-progress?

Please this one: Do you have a strategy for fiction? How will you be doing fiction different than non-fiction? How will you be handling creating the plot?

Thanks!

Wassup,

Aight - one by one here we go...

1. Each writer will be different. A tactic I use when negotiating to get a lower rate is by extending the period in which they can take to write the book. You can pitch it so they can work on other work whilst doing yours. But usually I say 7-10 days.

2. Check out Fivver, Can get gigs for $5 for 5000 words, 1000 words, 2000 words, 10000 words - quality ranges. I usually pay someone on Fiver $10 to do it then I will read through it myself too. They clean it up and sort the main mistakes then I might check it too as a secondary step

3. Probably 30/70 in the beginning. But once you have a good writer or two (or three) you don't need to do this step again.

4. Copyscape is main one. Secondary is making sure you find good writers and people you can trust.

5. Fiction, research process remains the same, as does hiring. Plot planning is based off of research. One thing you could try is looking at different markets and then applying them to the one ou want to enter. Example (made up on the spot): you identify that cowboys is really popular in acertain niche and selling very well, ask yourself could you apply this to a different market such as erotica. Does that make sense?

When I started fiction I looked at what was popular in the market identified: BDSM (thanks 50 shades) , NYC/ big cities, out of town girl in the big city, and generally a few darker aspects. So I added in drugs, modelling and a few other things then gave it to my writer and asked for her creative thoughts on it. She wrote a wee 200 word synopsis and I liked it so gave the go ahead.

 

[Djchrist15]

My question is this: When you started writing your books, did you already have some type of audience who were familiar with your content? Or did you start out from scratch? I have read from other people that you should always build your audience first and then sell a book once you have some type of following. Is it possible to just publish an e-book even though no one knows who you are?

 

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[A.I. Woods]

My question is this: When you started writing your books, did you already have some type of audience who were familiar with your content? Or did you start out from scratch? I have read from other people that you should always build your audience first and then sell a book once you have some type of following. Is it possible to just publish an e-book even though no one knows who you are?

Although I'm pretty sure that you were talking to the OP, I think that I may be qualified to answer this question, as I started writing eBooks just several months ago and have already built up a substantial level of passive income from it.

When I first started out, absolutely no one was familiar with my name. I started from complete scratch. Yet still, I have managed to accrue quite a bit from publishing eBooks. One way to get your name out there is to give it away for entirely free *gasp*, on its first few days. This way, you can increase your chances of getting some early reviews, by exposing your book to many readers. Honestly, after your books have some great reviews, whether people know who you are or not, you will most likely still get a reasonable number of sales. That is, if you write about popular subjects in the nonfiction category (I've only published nonfiction books up until now, so I don't know what to expect with fiction).

Honestly, if you wait to build up some massive audience before deciding to publish your books, then you may just miss out on your chance. Who knows how long the eBook publishing marketplace will remain profitable, with the speed at which things change nowadays?

 

[ped89]

Although I'm pretty sure that you were talking to the OP, I think that I may be qualified to answer this question, as I started writing eBooks just several months ago and have already built up a substantial level of passive income from it.

When I first started out, absolutely no one was familiar with my name. I started from complete scratch. Yet still, I have managed to accrue quite a bit from publishing eBooks. One way to get your name out there is to give it away for entirely free *gasp*, on its first few days. This way, you can increase your chances of getting some early reviews, by exposing your book to many readers. Honestly, after your books have some great reviews, whether people know who you are or not, you will most likely still get a reasonable number of sales. That is, if you write about popular subjects in the nonfiction category (I've only published nonfiction books up until now, so I don't know what to expect with fiction).

Honestly, if you wait to build up some massive audience before deciding to publish your books, then you may just miss out on your chance. Who knows how long the eBook publishing marketplace will remain profitable, with the speed at which things change nowadays?

Great answer!

I also want to chime in and add, building your audience first is great and will result in your first books being much more successful, but building an audience first takes much longer. However you can do the books first, build an audience (and email list) that way and THEN build out a blog/site/whatever to then boost it even further.

Both are great techniques, choose what isbest for you!

 

[Bruh]

@ped89 Thank you for the info Pete! Some more questions:

How do you take advantage of your email list? What kind of emails do you send and when?

How do you get people to subscribe? Do you have a lead magnet?

 

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[ped89]

@ped89 Thank you for the info Pete! Some more questions:

How do you take advantage of your email list? What kind of emails do you send and when?

How do you get people to subscribe? Do you have a lead magnet?

Get to subscribe by sending them to a squeeze page where you give away a free gift. Must be related to the topic of the book to make it convert well.

I send them new books when on free promo or 0.99c to kickstart the sales. I also send free content to them to keep them used to seeing the emails pop up in their inbox.

 

[Djchrist15]

Although I'm pretty sure that you were talking to the OP, I think that I may be qualified to answer this question, as I started writing eBooks just several months ago and have already built up a substantial level of passive income from it.

When I first started out, absolutely no one was familiar with my name. I started from complete scratch. Yet still, I have managed to accrue quite a bit from publishing eBooks. One way to get your name out there is to give it away for entirely free *gasp*, on its first few days. This way, you can increase your chances of getting some early reviews, by exposing your book to many readers. Honestly, after your books have some great reviews, whether people know who you are or not, you will most likely still get a reasonable number of sales. That is, if you write about popular subjects in the nonfiction category (I've only published nonfiction books up until now, so I don't know what to expect with fiction).

Honestly, if you wait to build up some massive audience before deciding to publish your books, then you may just miss out on your chance. Who knows how long the eBook publishing marketplace will remain profitable, with the speed at which things change nowadays?

Thanks for the useful advice! I heard a lot of people recommend give out the book for free at first. I completely agree. I think it makes more sense.

 

[jjipkr]

Solid thread. Thanks for the post. Where are you now? Somewhere in SEAsia I presume?

 

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[ped89]

thanks dude. Nah, Glasgow (Scotland).

 

[MichLap]

thanks dude. Nah, Glasgow (Scotland).

What made you move to Canada?