Charnell's eBook Progress Thread [Here we go, it's getting serious!]

[Silverhawk851]

Understand your point, and understand you want to make money.

Going to save you alot of $ and time by telling you, getting money is fundamentally an exchange.

You have to give people a reason to give you money...give them something they want.
Create Value.

The more people you help, the more you'll get.

It's the only way.

all the best

 

[Charnell]

Good evening everyone!
As you can tell, I just joined the forum, and want to jump right in.

Who am I?
I spent 5 years in the Marine Corps, and now I get to reap the benefits of going to school! 23 year old freshman, hell yeah. I got out of the Corps in April, and in June moved to the city where my school's at. I've made a lot of new friends, and reconnected with some old ones, but for the most part everyone is wrapped up in the 9-to-5 and partying or school and partying. Don't get me wrong, I love to party, but there's no one around here with the same money hungry mindset that I do. I've been going to a few of the Entrepreneur Club meetings, but everyone's caught up in the "5 year business plan and $500,000 bank loan" business. I'm about the act and react now business. Will it hurt me in the long run? Maybe, but it hasn't so far.

I've been playing around with self-publishing since the end of March. I started out actually writing books myself, but found it's a whole lot easier outsourcing. Right now I have 3 writers on oDesk, one who's been working for me since April, and the other two I just hired.

Here's my sales chart since I've started, and you can also see the amount published. September may be off around a hundred dollars, depending on how much KDP borrows are. Right now, based on the amount of sales I've had in October already, it's putting me at around $1300.

In total my expenses have been around $100 for stock photos, and $120 for outsourced writing.

Here we go!

 

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[Charnell]

So the month is nearly over, so I figure I'll round up numbers. As of right now I have

Sales: 105 ( about $230)
Borrows: 586 (if @ $1.50, $879)
Total: ~$1109

Freelancer Expenses: 172.75

Profit: ~$936

I'm not rolling in the dough yet, but I'm making steady gains (+$600 from last month) so my goals for November are to hire at least 2 more workers. I have 3 consistent workers right now that provide quality work. One is producing over 2k words a day minimum.

I'm considering hiring a VA for marketing reasons as well. Posting on various websites, submitting to review websites, "trading" reviews for me, etc.. Also to combine similar stories for me for volume.

 

[Charnell]

Between 2/1-2/7 sales decreased roughly 30.4%. Woof, I'll take the loss. I heard it was a pretty poor week for most, what with the holiday. What a polar plunge.
104 sales and 322 borrows for the week.

In other news, borrows came out to roughly $1.38, which sets January's grand total earnings to $3906.60! I know some cats are doing bigger things than that, but that is the highest amount I've earned in 1 month (before taxes) in my life. That's more than I made all of last year with Kindle books. Another interesting thing is my top 6 books for January, which amount to over 50% of total revenue, were created based on 0 research or foresight of any kind. Just an afternoon of let's see if this works.

 

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[AgainstAllOdds]

I think I interacted with more authors asking me about cover designs than actual people interested in reading.

1. Find a freelancer that will make cover designs cheap.
2. Set up a website that makes cover designs. Have it seem like he's a different person than you yourself.
3. Direct authors to that page. "Hey, I use this guy. He's pretty good. Tell him Charnell referred you and he'll probably give you a discount."
4. Keep growing on Instagram.

 

[Charnell]

Interesting. So you've had the most success with iTunes? Did you do specific marketing?

Actually, I only publish on Amazon. Maybe the color scheme is off on the charts...

I haven't done any marketing at all.

A majority of the books are fiction, with 2 being non-fiction how-to's, and 4 joke books. I put them all in select, launch the 5 day freebies so the also bought's populate, and forget about them.

All of the fiction are erotica. After reading a bunch of threads on Reddit one night, I stayed up until 8am writing my first story. Put it on Amazon, and since March, it's earned a whopping $7.03. What I like about the erotica genre is people buy bundles a lot. I have a 3 story bundle that's earned $127 so far, while the 3 stories that make it up have maybe earned $30 together.

 

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[Charnell]

Between 1/25-1/31 sales increased roughly 9.44%. This further proves to me that the Christmas rush is over, and these numbers are getting stable.
139 sales and 439 borrows for the week.
Month in Review: January
602 Sales + 1,922 Borrows = 2,524 total sales
I did 2,651 in all of 2014. I made around a c-note less in January than I did in all of 2014. I'm going to make more from this month than I've ever made in a month working (excluding terminal leave from the military). It's pretty wild to look at, especially considering it's barely part time work.
It's making me feel some type of way.

In other news Calculus is whooping my a$$ right now, John Stossel is starting to become interesting, and I bought an AR-15.

 

[Charnell]

It feels good to have a plan!

I know I've neglected to keep this thread updated, but I will start once again. I actually have a game plan for the rest of this month/until tasks are complete. They're mostly marketing my largest and best pen name, experimenting a bit so I can save everyone else time from failed attempts.

June Tasks

Instagram

• Continue with the 'gram. I amassed around 940 followers in my first month, which has slowly drained down to a hair below 900. I just posted a book cover after no activity for over a month and got a new follower and around 15 new likes.
• I changed my website link from a mailing list signup page to my new website, which I will talk about shortly.
• Use https://www.latergram.me/ to schedule posts, between 3 and 5 posts per day of book covers and over niche related images. I want to keep the advertising to niche related image ratio at around 1:3, a la jab, jab, jab, right hook.
• Purchase another 30 days credit to https://instagress.com/ to automate the liking and following of people using targeted hashtags.

This shouldn't take much time out of my day. I can schedule those whole week with latergram, then it will send me a notification on my phone to post. All I have to do is ok and submit, everything is already typed up.

Website

• Have already set it up, installed WordPress and a premium theme (BTW, creativemarket.com gives away a free premium theme and other goodies every Monday). It's a responsive theme, so no worries about people on mobile from Instagram.
• I'm going through and making blog posts for each book. Woof. There are quite a few. I used getbookreport.com to create a list of all the books under this pen name's earnings from the last 90 days, and that's my priority for what blog post to do next. Each blog post consists of the book title, the description from Amazon, and the "look inside" portion from Amazon as a sample. I also have a clickable "buy now from Amazon" button before the sample, as well as a clickable book cover after the sample.

This will absolutely take up a majority of the time. Hopefully well worth it. Will report back haha.

The eBooks

• Because the summer months are absolutely dogshit when it comes to book sales, I ended contracts with all my freelance writers minus the one who I considered the best. He always over delivered, so I'm increasing his contract rate so he can provide 1 new story a week.
• I also am going through reports from the getbookreport.com plugin and seeing which books haven't been on their quarterly free book giveaway via Select. I'm updating their front and back matter to include a link to my website. In the last 90 days, there were 22,943 free downloads from this pen name with $0 spent on marketing. If even 1% go to the website, that's around 200 visits. If 10% are repeat buyers/borrowers or join the mailing list this will be worth it. It's a lot of effort upfront doing all the changes, but after that every 3 months will be like clockwork.
• I'm also going to do a few more permanently free books as well. Last month, one title, no advertising, did over 1,450 downloads on Amazon and over 2750 downloads from Draft2Digital sales channels. Non-stop advertising for a bit of upfront costs.

Well...that's most of my gameplan. Time to read then go to sleep.

 

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[AgainstAllOdds]

It feels good to have a plan!

• Because the summer months are absolutely dogshit when it comes to book sales, I ended contracts with all my freelance writers minus the one who I considered the best. He always over delivered, so I'm increasing his contract rate so he can provide 1 new story a week.

Why not create more content now? Then have it all ready once fall comes around + the few sales that come between now and then?

 

[Charnell]

Why not create more content now? Then have it all ready once fall comes around + the few sales that come between now and then?

The biggest reason is this pen name has gotten pretty large (volume wise, not necessarily popularity), so there's already plenty of older content for readers to consume. There's also the horrible shelf life for short, adult fiction (which is why I plan to slow down working with this market and get back into nonfiction). On average, after about a month a book stops selling well. Again, this is with 0 marketing and advertising, which I want and need to change.

Here are two of my better selling examples:

Good ROI, paying ~$60 for each of the stories, but it's a constant churning out content.

For the first book, after 94 days (release Feb 27th and June 1), on average made $2.08 per day. In the first 30 days (Feb 27-March29) it made on average $4.59 per day.

The second, after 103 days (released Feb 18th and June 1), on average made $1.29 per day. In it's first 30 days (Feb 18-March 20) it made on average $4.11 per day.

Here's a graph of one of my nonfiction books, again 0 marketing and advertising.

Doing the same number crunching from previous posts:
First 30 days (Jan 29 to Feb 28) daily average: $2.89
From release to June 1st daily average (123 days): $2.189

DAMN CONSISTENT

I actually have, 12 short stories waiting to be published under this name, some of them 1 month+ old. I could easily do 1 a week for the rest of the summer to maintain standings/turn them into freebies to drive traffic to the website and to paid books.

Sorry if this has already been discussed - couldn't read the whole thread: But where did you hire these incredible cheap writers?

Formerly odesk, now upwork.com.

Nice thread, just a short question @Charnell: You say you're a publisher, not an author. How do you handle book authorships? Are you creating your own brand name and hire them as ghostwriters or do you display the real name of authors?

I am creating my own pen names for the books. There is no way to tie back the final product to the original creator.

In my previous post I mentioned 1 single Instagram post, made during the writing of that post. So far that post has gathered 46 likes and 2 new followers, a post on a whim. Does anyone know a good way to track how many clicks my IG link gets? I don't want to use a 3rd party like bit.ly. If I setup a page like www.mydomain.com/instagram would I be able to track clicks through there with either Jetpack or Google Analytic?

 

[Charnell]

I got some traffic to my website!

Yesterday was the first day of a few books getting put on their 5 day free promo. Besides that, I sent an e-mail out to my list yesterday morning which proved less than successful. Around 25% clicks on the website. My mistake for sending it out at 11AM, when most people are working.

That brought a small boost in the midday, then 5PM hit and that's where a majority of people came to the website. I had around 200 giveaways, and in total around 130 people went to my website, minus the 20 or so times it counted me.

Protip: disable tracking of your own IP in Google Analytics.

When does watching real time visitors get old? Sure it was never more than 2 or 3 at a time, but knowing that someone in Georgia and LA and Oregon are all browsing my books seems pretty cool to me.

In other news, my IG account was banned. No big deal. If I ever start a new IG account, I'll have 90 days worth of Instagress time lined up.

Probably after a week from today I'll post site statistics. Wont count yesterday as I probably heavily influenced bounce rates and time on the website.

Gameplan

• Take the best of the dozen books waiting to get published, and make them permanently free. Get covers made and format.
• Received an e-mail from a reader, liked the work just wished they were longer. Noted.
• Continue adding old books to website as blog posts, so people can browse more. I can, on average, do 1 ever 15 minutes.
• Stop watching real time visitors so much.

 

[Charnell]

Royalties report came out today on Amazon, I finally broke into the 4 figures club this last month. Clocked in at about $1,056, depending on how they calculate exchange rates. So far so good, for every 1 dollar I've put into this I've gotten over 4 back.

One thing I think I'm going to do, after looking at my sales trends, is moving into non-fiction. Adult fiction is fast, easy, and cheap, but the shelf life is bottom of the barrel. I have some erotica books released in June that have completely fallen off, while my how-tos have consistently sold ever month, now surpassing most of the fiction singles. Of course, the bundles are the real bread winners, making up over 3/4 of sales.

 

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[Gymjunkie]

I'm in the process of getting my first non-fiction ebook created! I'm having one of my freelancers that really provides high quality books create it. He's also doing it at a reduced rate ($8/1000 words, as opposed to $10/1000) because I'm providing him with all the research material he needs.

$8 per 1000 words??? GTFO! What a deal if he's good.

Good luck!

 

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[Charnell]

It's beautiful, seeing my estimated earnings per hour and per book rising everyday.

Yesterday I put out 2 books, one of them being a 2-for-1 special containing the first stories in two different series. Hopefully it generates some mailing list joins and people reading the rest of the books in the series. I checked goodreads, and was met with a bunch of 5 star reviews. Can not be mad about that!

I've hired 3 more freelancers today. It's time to start the nonfiction portion of the journey. I'm a little nervous, to be honest...

Also, I'm a little over halfway finished with TMF . Oooh I can't wait to finish it, probably tomorrow morning. After I'm finished with it I'll blaze though Lifehacked by Allen Wong.

 

[Charnell]

So I ended up hiring 7(!) more freelancers for writing. That brings the grand total to 9. . . I'm mostly focusing on business niches, targeting 18-35 year old corporate types. Hopefully sales reflect the $350+ a week increase in spending. If not I'll just go back to what I know: fiction.

In other news, since the start of my journey back in March, I've spent around $550 between outsourcing, stock photos, and advertising. I went on appannie.com for the first time in a while, updated my credentials, and checked my revenue as of Oct. 31st. Here are some of my top earners overall.

It turns out 1 hours of work one day back in each April, September, and October is worth $882.86 a few months down the road. Not only does that cover all expenses so far after taxes, that leaves a whole lot other money to try other ventures. Next stop, Android apps.

 

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[Charnell]

2014 Year in Review:
2651 books sold. I'm getting the hang of this, at least I better be damn it. Keywords are coming together, getting positive reviews, all in all on the up and up. Real different from March when I sold 4 books in total. Hit over 700 sales in December, with the 31st being my best day ever, outselling all of June combined.

Covers are starting to come together as well. I'm still doing them myself, but am learning every time I create a cover. My April covers compared to my December covers are like comparing Nick Cannon and Dave Chappelle. No comparison. Nick Cannon is garbage.

I feel like my book descriptions have improved vastly from when I first started. The first book I wrote and published, the description was 2 sentences. No wonder it's only made ~$12 in 10 months. Especially compared to my newer releases, where they make triple that on day one. Reading up on copywriting really helped me out there.

Non-fiction has been doing alright for me this month. Overall, adding up all of the freelancer's payments versus the money made from strictly non-fiction I came out a loss, but I'm looking for the long burn with those titles. That's what I found with my non-fiction, they sell 5+ copies a month, but never die out like fiction.

Is it strange that the biggest thing I was looking forward to this year was a spreadsheet? I have this damn elaborate spreadsheet with all kinds of charts and graphs that give monthly sales predictions based on daily sales, individual book tracking, goal setting along with calculating exactly what you need to do to reach that goal, earnings per word, expected tax payments, word count tracker, etc. I wish I could share it, but I don't know if the creator of it would want me to.

Some of the numbers of goofy (publish 249 books this year? Possible but I'm gonna need a few more freelancers) and they wont project actual publishing/word goals until Feb.

I'm coming into this year on a very high note, hitting my highest day on the 31st of December, I'm going to keep this momentum going.

 

[Charnell]

Damn, is it all out-sourced? I want to write down 10 books maybe, before out-sourcing! Do you have any tips to give me? I recently published my first book, and I am also in the middle of writting my second one. Both of them are creative non-fiction.

I know learning is a process, but any tips or suggestions will be gladly accepted!!

Best tip is write those books before you start outsourcing.

It's a bit different but I'm a first year non-trad college student. After outsourcing two hundred thousand words, being told I have to write a 10 page (maybe 2,000 words) feels like such a chore. I sit there trudging along thinking I could pay someone $30 to write about Anti-Intellectualism in Social Media.

 

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[Charnell]

2015 is off to a bang. We're 10 days into January and it's already my best month ever as far as sales go. Averaging 19 sales and 66 borrows a day, which I'm still mind boggled over. Keywords really coming in clutch.

 

[Charnell]

LEARN HOW TO FIND KEYWORDS
I can't stress this enough. If you want to make any sort of moves in the game, learn to find keywords. On December 28th, I started using a keyword program. On December 29th, sales made an all-time high, then again and again a few days later.


I can attribute a portion of the increased sales to Christmas (new kindles/kindle unlimited/gift cards), but I feel like the month would have continued much like December 27th/28th. A bit better but nothing to make a post about.

This month my average sales are where my average borrows were last month, and my average borrows are 3 times that.

KEYWORD TIP (Amazon)
Amazon will auto-populate the search bar with commonly searched for strings of text. If you use ebook as a keyword (which I strongly encourage you not to) you will be in a sea of over 6.5 million books. Instead, you would want to use ebook on amazon (which I strongly encourage you not to) which only has 3.2 million books.
You'll definitely not want to use such a broad keyword like ebook.

13/30. 13 out of the top 30 search results for a keyword with over 180,000 results are my books. Of those, 10 are on the first page. I also hold the number 1 spot.

Keep a spreadsheet with your keywords in it. If you have a series all on how to read ebooks, there's no reason to type out all those keywords for each book. Especially if you're writing/outsourcing a lot it's a whole lot easier to keep track of in one spreadsheet as opposed to opening up their individual book details page.

In fact, I keep everything minus the actual content in spreadsheets/files. For my fiction I have a spreadsheet with all titles, subtitles, niches, and book descriptions. For my nonfiction I have individual folders where I have their cover, cover file, "raw" book, final form book, and a word file with the description copy and keywords.

If anyone wants to know anything else, leave a reply.

 

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[Charnell]

Plan for February​

A few things I plan on doing, a little braindump if you will. Someone keep me accountable.

• Separate books under different pen names. Don't want them getting so cluttered. 10/27 exchanged
• Update backmatter of two new pen names. Include links of all books at the end with descriptions. Include small cover to save space as well as descriptions. 0/Loads
• Update mailing lists. Only configured a few items, want to make them as beautiful as possible. 0/4
• Setup new page for mailing list. I found a pretty good method that automates gaining new subscribers a few weeks ago. Slow but steady. 0/2
• Research VA's so I can hire one to do advertising for me. Someone in my mastermind group sent me a huge list of websites that offer advertising, FB pages that do advertising, ect. We'll see if the return>cost.

I'll update these weekly on Sundays when I give my previous week's numbers.

 

[Charnell]

Between 2/1-2/7 sales increased roughly 10.5%. Oh yeah, still on the rise.
145 sales and 473 borrows for the week.

This last week was pretty productive, just not in my business. If you've read this thread, you know I'm an old a$$ freshman. I had 3 tests and a quiz this week, and came to find out last Monday I didn't know a damn thing about Calculus. So I took to Khan Academy and basically learned the first month of class in a few days. I'll get test results on Tuesday. Should get a pretty good score, it felt pretty easy.

I have one more test this week, then it's back to the daily learnin.

All of February's extracurricular activity is still at the same place it was last Tuesday.

 

[KennyJA]

Hi Charnell!

I am impressed and inspired by your thread, I've been self publishing since the last day of March and have written my own books. No ghost writing.

It seems you've had success since you've started. I don't even make half of what you shown on your first graph on page 1. Did the sales and KOL's come through somewhat easily or did you put hard effort into advertising since day one?

I'm trying get my books out there and thus my sales. I'm working on my third book (all non-fiction). Any tips on how to bridge the gap from nothing to something? By that I mean actually earning at least a 100 bucks a month because I'm not even there yet lol

You've made 85 dollars in your first month if I'm not mistaken, what resources and steps did you take and use?

 

[Charnell]

How many words is a short story consider to be of?

Maybe @ChickenHawk can chime in on this, but as far as I know anything less than 20k words is a short story, 20k-50k (or 70k depending on who you ask) is a novella, and anything more than that is a novel.

What would a crazy good deal be consider per 1K words?

Writing it yourself.

 

[Charnell]

I'm in the process of getting my first non-fiction ebook created! I'm having one of my freelancers that really provides high quality books create it. He's also doing it at a reduced rate ($8/1000 words, as opposed to $10/1000) because I'm providing him with all the research material he needs.

I found a niche that is growing increasingly popular, and only has one! kindle book on the 'zon about it, which has an average of 2.6/5 stars after nearly 30 reviews; it has over twice as many 1 stars as 5 stars. When it is written and published, I plan on hiring ~20 people from odesk to review it to really get the ball rolling.I'm also not going for the normal 5000 word book. My plan is to have it made up to 20,000 words.

 

[Charnell]

I'm having a hard time finding good niches.

Any tactics you find good?

I've used the regular searching for keywords in amazon, searching klickbank.

Can't find s*it.

I'm going to have to research how to research haha.

$8 per 1000 words??? GTFO! What a deal if he's good.

Good luck!

He's ghostwritten 6 of my erotica stories, and they have all been pretty damn successful. Zero editting to do, and he was working for $3/1000, plus a bonus when a series was complete to bring it up to roughly $4.5/1000. He's a college student in Sri Lanka, and does work!

 

[Charnell]

I am starting in self publishing, and that was my kind of model... I mean, scalating up and publishing as much medium quality books as possible. What are your thoughts on mass publishing? Why do you think it's not a good idea? I'm pretty interested to know your opinion!

If you produce medium quality books, you'll get less than medium quality success. I learned that the hard way. A $10 ebook is a $10 ebook, you might make $30 off of it but once those 1 star reviews start coming it's game over. Honestly the best advice I can give is quality>quantity.

 

[Gymjunkie]

I am starting in self publishing, and that was my kind of model... I mean, scalating up and publishing as much medium quality books as possible. What are your thoughts on mass publishing? Why do you think it's not a good idea? I'm pretty interested to know your opinion!

It's the equivalent of building Adsense Websites to just have people click on ads.. it's low value. I don't like that.. It's a good business idea in a sense that it is scalable etc but I wouldn't do it. One of the terms of picking business to do is whether it can be great. There are good examples of niche sites where owner tries to be the best at it and it's Pat Flynn's stuff (www.smartpassiveincome.com has two case studies there). BUT it's not scalable so you can't have thousand of those websites fast..

 

[Gymjunkie]

Exactly. It will work, for about 8 minutes. Then people will catch on and you're in a hole.

Gotta say some do get away with it and it works... for some. We don't live in a perfect world..
Also can't say how much effort he puts in.. so. Just a very grey area...

 

[Andy Black]

alcohol is a magic potion that steals happiness from tomorrow for today

Awesome line. Lol...


EDIT:

The more people you help, the more you'll get.

^^^ As is this.

 

[Charnell]

Good evening everyone.

Business is working still. I had to fire a freelancer after 2 weeks of delays and then a week of not responding. Now I'm sitting at 8, bringing me books around every two weeks. Still trying to narrow down the niches, where I don't put out garbage I know nothing about like depression or medical help stuff, but still topics that can bring some longevity to my investment.

I also joined my first mastermind group.

A few months ago after I got home I worked at a gym my friend is a personal trainer at for about a month. He's very good at talking to people, so a lot of the older regulars knew him well. One of the guys, I didn't know it at the time, runs his own business online, consulting, courses, etc. I guess my friend told him about the ebooks I'm doing, he adds me on Facebook, and last week he asked if I wanted to be apart of a Skype call he was doing. Besides him and me, one of the guys in the call did ebooks as well and the other guy was doing real estate. Already I've gotten new connections with other guys in their networks, so I'm pretty pumped about that.

Long story short, I'm going to start selling shovels now. I've realized that apart from my unwillingness to solely target profitable niches, I know (what I assume to be) everything there is to publishing ebooks. No matter how many books I read or courses I've taken, I don't learn much of anything. So this week I'm going to put my knowledge on paper and start to write my own book on publishing, one I can put my real name on. They're going to hold me accountable, and the last thing I want is to be seen as a slacker (or whatever) after the first meeting.

The next meeting is set for Sunday at noon.

Game plan:
Monday: Create TOC/Outline
It's so much easier to write when I have a plan. I'm going to go as in depth as I can to make it easier. Chapters, any points I need to make, quotes to include, everything to make the process easier.
Tuesday-Saturday: Write
Bottom line. I have nothing going on this week. I don't have any plans for Christmas, so there is no excuse not to. The best time for, for maximum productivity, is around an hour after I wake up. After that I will cut off my internet and phone to disable distractions. I will try to utilize the pomodoro method as much as I can.

I'm pumped.