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

[ped89]

Needed a change of environment and I love Canada. Great country.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Cyberseraph]

Hey Pete,
I have another question. Currently I am self-publishing Erotica on the german Amazon platform. Now they made some changes and unfortunately all books that are in the Erotica category don't have a Amazon Best Sellers Rank anymore. You still can see if it is in the top 100 in erotica but not the general ranking. Now I can not see how well a book sells which is hard for research.



I can see that some authors started to publish their erotica in general romance to have more visibility. But my books are too short for romance, only 5K words long which is fine for erotica but would get probably bad reviews in other categories.

What would your recommend? Should I change the category to romance and let my freelancers write more words?

Or would you stay in erotica and trust the top 100 for my research (without Best Seller Rang visibility)?

 

[ped89]

Hey Pete,
I have another question. Currently I am self-publishing Erotica on the german Amazon platform. Now they made some changes and unfortunately all books that are in the Erotica category don't have a Amazon Best Sellers Rank anymore. You still can see if it is in the top 100 in erotica but not the general ranking. Now I can not see how well a book sells which is hard for research.

View attachment 8110

I can see that some authors started to publish their erotica in general romance to have more visibility. But my books are too short for romance, only 5K words long which is fine for erotica but would get probably bad reviews in other categories.

What would your recommend? Should I change the category to romance and let my freelancers write more words?

Or would you stay in erotica and trust the top 100 for my research (without Best Seller Rang visibility)?

I would do two things - trust the ranking system for germany. But I would double down and focus on the US market - 600 position in US store for erotica is GREAT.

If you're worried about being too short, see if you can get Amazon to rank your books in the "Kindle-short-reads"then people won't be annoyed about books being so short as they expect them to be that length.

Pete

 

[MJ DeMarco]

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.

Wow, you just basically summed up the entire IM industry. When the old marketing tactic no longer works, turn around and sell it with the newest marketing tactic. Then repeat.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Lauryn]

I respect and enjoy the candor, hustle and transparency here.

 

[redshep]

@ped89 I read my post again, and while I don't regret what I wrote, the tone could've been nicer towards someone offering to share. There's good and bad ways to do anything and I shouldn't jump to conclusions. Of course I think self-publishing is a viable fastlane, given the commandments are respected. Also, there's nothing wrong with the marketing techniques of building a respectful sales funnel through email, blogs and leveraging amazon itself. Just weary of the internet marketing circus.

 

[ped89]

@ped89 I read my post again, and while I don't regret what I wrote, the tone could've been nicer towards someone offering to share. There's good and bad ways to do anything and I shouldn't jump to conclusions. Of course I think self-publishing is a viable fastlane, given the commandments are respected. Also, there's nothing wrong with the marketing techniques of building a respectful sales funnel through email, blogs and leveraging amazon itself. Just weary of the internet marketing circus.

Bro - absolutely no hard feelings or anything, I 100% know where you're coming from. There is scumbags out there and its an unfortunate part of life and I'm weary of it too. Keep rocking anyway and I appreciate the post! Cheers pete

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[daveliquid]

I wrote a 25-or-so page book on investing in tax liens (non-fiction) and self-published on Amazon last year. So far, I have one great review and two bad reviews.

Question: what are you using within Amazon for the marketing? I feel like my book got basically zero exposure, and so did not sell a lot. I appreciate that you have many more books than that, but where do you find this "marketing option" within the Amazon site that skyrockets you to number 1?

Thanks,

Dave

 

[StephenD]

Hey Ped, I was wondering if you could elaborate a little more on your process of hiring and working with writers?

• Do you approach them with a subject and a list of resources that you want them to reference from?
• Are the ghost writers specialists in a certain area or just generic writers who you are approaching to churn out specific content?
• What is your process for deciding what the subject matter should be about?

This is probably naive of me but it sounds as though you're approaching writers on the cheap (as it's Fiverr!) and they'll delivering an eBook a week later. I'd imagine the quality would be pretty poor (as I've used Fiverr in the past and I wouldn't have a tremendous amount of faith in them delivering a quality 10k word eBook in 7 days) but you've already stated that quality is really important to you. What am I missing here?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Cyberseraph]

600 position in US store for erotica is GREAT.

Thanks for your reply and advice Pete!

PS: Just want to clarify that it was a reandom screenshot for illustration purposes only (and not my book title). I have no books in US store yet but will do so this year. [HASHTAG]#600[/HASHTAG] position in US store would be a dream coming true!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[ped89]

Hey Ped, I was wondering if you could elaborate a little more on your process of hiring and working with writers?

• Do you approach them with a subject and a list of resources that you want them to reference from?
• Are the ghost writers specialists in a certain area or just generic writers who you are approaching to churn out specific content?
• What is your process for deciding what the subject matter should be about?

This is probably naive of me but it sounds as though you're approaching writers on the cheap (as it's Fiverr!) and they'll delivering an eBook a week later. I'd imagine the quality would be pretty poor (as I've used Fiverr in the past and I wouldn't have a tremendous amount of faith in them delivering a quality 10k word eBook in 7 days) but you've already stated that quality is really important to you. What am I missing here?

Thanks in advance!

yoyo,
I would never use Fiver for writers, can't control the quality. I work 1-1 with writers that I find via odesk, elance, craigslist etc. To be hired they have to go through several testing stages to make sure they are good.

As for the other questions:
Yes - I give an outline to them that is buiilt from my research process
Ideally specialists
Research other existing books and look for recurring themes, check the reviews sections to see where I can improve, use Quora to find out what people are asking on the specific topic, check forums to see what people are talking about and whats important to target market

 

[Cyberseraph]

Hi Pete,
what is your source for covers (non-fiction and fiction)?
If you are using Fiverr for cover design, can you recommend a specific contact that you had good experience with?

Thanks!

 

[PrincessK]

I wrote my book in the inspirational niche and made sales the 1st day also. I was so excited because it is my childhood passion . Are you considering doing a course in the future w a facebook group ? Feel free to pm me

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Karla]

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.

I know the Kindle Money Mastery Course and I must say that I like Stefan Pylarinos (the creater of this course) and his blog. One of his blog posts inspired me to publish on kindle and I´m happy I did. That being said I completely understand your point of view. I agree that it is not a good idea to just publish as many cheap and crappy books as you can and hope to find someone to buy them. I write my own books. This way I am sure I will only deliver high quality content. But I do think that this is not the only way. I think you can also publish books that are high quality and that you haven't written yourself. Why not? I also tried to outsource but wasn`t happy with the quality ;-)

 

[ped89]

Hi Pete,
what is your source for covers (non-fiction and fiction)?
If you are using Fiverr for cover design, can you recommend a specific contact that you had good experience with?

Thanks!

pro-ebook covers is awesome. She is really good.

 

[borntodominate]

@ped89 i have no capital to buy a cover for my fitness book, i have no idea what to do. Tried messing around on photoshop but it ends up looking very unprofessional

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Karla]

@ped89 i have no capital to buy a cover for my fitness book, i have no idea what to do. Tried messing around on photoshop but it ends up looking very unprofessional

You can get very decent covers on fiverr to start with. I am sure you can invest 5$?!

 

[Lex DeVille]

You can get very decent covers on fiverr to start with. I am sure you can invest 5$?!

Something to watch out for with Fiverr covers is whether or not they supply a photo. I thought about using Fiverr to speed things up the other night, but noticed a lot of the samples don't have people on them, which leads me to believe they're mostly artistic creations. These covers can work well for a variety of different genres but for a fitness book it could be a problem since he probably needs a muscular body in the image.

The one time I used Fiverr for a cover it turned out well, but I had to supply my own image.

 

[Karla]

Something to watch out for with Fiverr covers is whether or not they supply a photo. I thought about using Fiverr to speed things up the other night, but noticed a lot of the samples don't have people on them, which leads me to believe they're mostly artistic creations. These covers can work well for a variety of different genres but for a fitness book it could be a problem since he probably needs a muscular body in the image.

The one time I used Fiverr for a cover it turned out well, but I had to supply my own image.

Yes, I always provide my own image/s!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Cyberseraph]

pro-ebook covers is awesome. She is really good.

This is such a coincidence, I am actually also using Angie (pro-ebook covers) on Fiverr and yes, she is awesome!
The only downside is that she has so many customers waiting that it always takes 4 days for her to deliver.

 

[rogen]

I just made my first sale. I wrote short story yesterday, done a bit of research on the patterns and book reviews, saw comments "i need more of these!", made cover, and by the night I made my first 2.10 dollars. I know it's nothing but for me it's motivating!

Thanks Pete! Now I guess I have to scale it up!

 

[ped89]

I just made my first sale. I wrote short story yesterday, done a bit of research on the patterns and book reviews, saw comments "i need more of these!", made cover, and by the night I made my first 2.10 dollars. I know it's nothing but for me it's motivating!

Thanks Pete! Now I guess I have to scale it up!

AWESOME!

Yeah, might seem like nothing now(I remember the feeling haha) but wait till you scale. It was really motivating for me too, got me pumped up to go full throttle

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Cyberseraph]

Hey Pete,

I have another question regarding outsourcing. Until now I was writing short content by myself and hired freelancers to write several 5K word stories. But now I would like to produce a 40k - 50k word fiction novel. Your "Gauntlet" testing method is great. Do you have any other advice when looking for the right writer, especially for such a big project?

This would be a bigger financial investment for me and I am a bit nervous. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Chazmania]

@ped89

Are you still focusing on this business? Just curious as to how everything is going and if you've changed your approach at all.

 

[Justincredible]

Great info here, thanks OP & all those who contributed.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Camor07]

Question for you all: Would you read a book about a college kids experience and journey in shanghai?

Probably sound pretty stupid, but the amount of people who visit the page, and ask for more posts is substantial. D

chilleninchina.wordpress.com

Did you enjoy reading these posts?

 

[aks]

Question for you all: Would you read a book about a college kids experience and journey in shanghai?

Probably sound pretty stupid, but the amount of people who visit the page, and ask for more posts is substantial. D

chilleninchina.wordpress.com

Did you enjoy reading these posts?

well if you want to write a book to sell, check out genres that has competition (on amazon). (as icecream kid says) if there is competion there is a need. but given most dont want to market, you need to also delve into deeper genres in such cases.
to boot in fiction, romance is always hot(expires quickly, so always new is needed). than comes crime and thriller.

me personally, "college kids experience" isnt much interest unless it is a thriller.

 

[Boozoon]

me personally, "college kids experience" isnt much interest unless it is a thriller.

or erotica

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[ped89]

@ped89

Are you still focusing on this business? Just curious as to how everything is going and if you've changed your approach at all.

Hey, sorry on the late reply.

So, I'm not focused on this exact business, but still in the trenches every single day. I'll explain...

I scaled it up a bit then sold the business and teamed up with Austin from http://epic-launch.com

So, although I'm still in the industry not focused on the business this thread was about.

As far as what changed in my approach, the same model still works, it's takes a little bit more effort to make money from it as the market has become saturated so the things that are even more important than ever are VERY high-quality covers, descriptions and of course... content in the book. There's so much shit content avail. that quality is more important than ever.

Building out a series of books is still a key to getting as much organic traffic from Amazon as possible. And of course, collecting emails from books is crucial too.

Happy to answer any more questions

 

[Boozoon]

Hey, sorry on the late reply.

So, I'm not focused on this exact business, but still in the trenches every single day. I'll explain...

I scaled it up a bit then sold the business and teamed up with Austin from http://epic-launch.com

So, although I'm still in the industry not focused on the business this thread was about.

As far as what changed in my approach, the same model still works, it's takes a little bit more effort to make money from it as the market has become saturated so the things that are even more important than ever are VERY high-quality covers, descriptions and of course... content in the book. There's so much shit content avail. that quality is more important than ever.

Building out a series of books is still a key to getting as much organic traffic from Amazon as possible. And of course, collecting emails from books is crucial too.

Happy to answer any more questions

Hey man, thanks for letting us ask questions!

My main question is the following, how do you go about finding keywords?

Let's say you have written a romance about a college girl and a professor that the establishment does not want them to be together. How would you go on typing/finding those 7 keywords?

Also, when we link between our books, shall we do so after searching the book by name, or by keyword? If the book is named "Adversities in times of study" (lame title, can't think anything right now) and a keyword is "college girl professor romance adversities", is it better to reference the book in our other works after searching by name or by KW?