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- Feb 26, 2014
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Hey guys and gals!
One week ago I finished a small e-book that I co-authored with a friend of mine that we published on Kindle. It was a nice experience so we have in mind to keep finding subjects to write about and I would like this thread to be our journey, where we write our mistakes (and oh boy, they are a lot!), what we learn (we are reading some books that might benefit the members here) and hopefully get an advice or two!
So here we go.
We are both trainers with an evidence based background so our first e book was an around 40 pages book, on how to lose weight with X tips.
We used merchantwords.com/ to find a good title. Not sure if the numbers are real, but we had nothing to lose. We did our research and found a title that combined some "hot" keywords, at least according to the site.
In the meantime, we were researching the topic, reading studies on nutrition, behavior, biases etc etc. We wanted to get promoted by the coaches and dietitians that support the evidence based approach.
I also read The Boron Letters and continued with Gary Halbert newsletter where I learned a lot. Really helped me with the introduction, the description and some other minor stuff. Always trying to say how something is going to help someone can be really powerful you know?
We decided to hire a professional graphic designer in order to make us a kickass book cover, and damn was it brilliant! She also wanted to try and fill the pages with HD pictures and make the book look as beautiful as possible. She created a phenomenal pdf (keep this in mind, you will need it in a while) and we were really pleased. So we decided to go onward and publish it.
And when we uploaded the book, the problems started
1) Remember the phenomenal pdf? Turns out, the graphics could not be converted in Kindle, so the viewing of the book was really ugly. Kindle asked for a doc version so we had to lower the quality a lot and cut some content. But, we had already paid a lot of money for the whole book and now we could not use it. So instead of paying 50 bucks for just the cover, we paid 300 bucks for the cover and a version of the book that we could not use. You can say that we effectively wasted 250 dollars.
2) Even when we made the mediocre version available, Kindle had other thoughts. We had to wait some days to get the book approved and uploaded and then we had to wait some more for the free offer to start. So instead of Monday, we started the promotion at around Wednesday through Sunday.
3) We wanted to promote the book, so I tried a promotion through my page on Facebook. It got denied because the picture of the book had more than 20% text. Yeah, sucks. My friend also tried to promote it through Google Ads, also got rejected. At least a lot of people shared it and we got lots of downloads.
4) Thinking that we were OK now, we believed that we could do some promotion on Reddit. We decided to post the book while still being free, in a subreddit on weight loss. Got downvoted hard because apparently they didn't like the promotion or it was against the rules. We read the rules beforehand and they said nothing about "not promoting" but OK, you gotta respect the community.
5) The final problem showed itself some days ago. Being too confident in our English ( we are both Greeks) we didn't proofread the text. You can imagine what happened? Lots of mistakes and apparently a whole section of the book, was missing. Again, we started correcting everything we could do.
Now with the majority of the mistakes taken care of, we feel comfortable enough to begin marketing the book some more, with the use of keywords and SEO.
Here are some statistics
Free units sold : 957
Paid units sold : 5
Reviews : 3 (two 5 stars and one 4 star)
We will continue promoting the book (my friend has some resources that he is currently reading) and we will start researching our next topic. I am currently reading Convert by Frank Kern and I think that I got some info that I can use in the promotion of the book.
That was it guys and gals! We will keep in touch while updating this topic ^_^
One week ago I finished a small e-book that I co-authored with a friend of mine that we published on Kindle. It was a nice experience so we have in mind to keep finding subjects to write about and I would like this thread to be our journey, where we write our mistakes (and oh boy, they are a lot!), what we learn (we are reading some books that might benefit the members here) and hopefully get an advice or two!
So here we go.
THE MAKING
We are both trainers with an evidence based background so our first e book was an around 40 pages book, on how to lose weight with X tips.
We used merchantwords.com/ to find a good title. Not sure if the numbers are real, but we had nothing to lose. We did our research and found a title that combined some "hot" keywords, at least according to the site.
In the meantime, we were researching the topic, reading studies on nutrition, behavior, biases etc etc. We wanted to get promoted by the coaches and dietitians that support the evidence based approach.
I also read The Boron Letters and continued with Gary Halbert newsletter where I learned a lot. Really helped me with the introduction, the description and some other minor stuff. Always trying to say how something is going to help someone can be really powerful you know?
We decided to hire a professional graphic designer in order to make us a kickass book cover, and damn was it brilliant! She also wanted to try and fill the pages with HD pictures and make the book look as beautiful as possible. She created a phenomenal pdf (keep this in mind, you will need it in a while) and we were really pleased. So we decided to go onward and publish it.
PUBLISHING
All seemed great so we said "hey lets publish it!". We wanted to offer the book for free Monday through Friday so that we could get a good ranking and also create some traffic.And when we uploaded the book, the problems started
1) Remember the phenomenal pdf? Turns out, the graphics could not be converted in Kindle, so the viewing of the book was really ugly. Kindle asked for a doc version so we had to lower the quality a lot and cut some content. But, we had already paid a lot of money for the whole book and now we could not use it. So instead of paying 50 bucks for just the cover, we paid 300 bucks for the cover and a version of the book that we could not use. You can say that we effectively wasted 250 dollars.
2) Even when we made the mediocre version available, Kindle had other thoughts. We had to wait some days to get the book approved and uploaded and then we had to wait some more for the free offer to start. So instead of Monday, we started the promotion at around Wednesday through Sunday.
3) We wanted to promote the book, so I tried a promotion through my page on Facebook. It got denied because the picture of the book had more than 20% text. Yeah, sucks. My friend also tried to promote it through Google Ads, also got rejected. At least a lot of people shared it and we got lots of downloads.
4) Thinking that we were OK now, we believed that we could do some promotion on Reddit. We decided to post the book while still being free, in a subreddit on weight loss. Got downvoted hard because apparently they didn't like the promotion or it was against the rules. We read the rules beforehand and they said nothing about "not promoting" but OK, you gotta respect the community.
5) The final problem showed itself some days ago. Being too confident in our English ( we are both Greeks) we didn't proofread the text. You can imagine what happened? Lots of mistakes and apparently a whole section of the book, was missing. Again, we started correcting everything we could do.
Now with the majority of the mistakes taken care of, we feel comfortable enough to begin marketing the book some more, with the use of keywords and SEO.
Here are some statistics
Free units sold : 957
Paid units sold : 5
Reviews : 3 (two 5 stars and one 4 star)
We will continue promoting the book (my friend has some resources that he is currently reading) and we will start researching our next topic. I am currently reading Convert by Frank Kern and I think that I got some info that I can use in the promotion of the book.
That was it guys and gals! We will keep in touch while updating this topic ^_^
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Nice start, and I wouldn't say the pdf was wasted money. If you did it at right size, you could actually use it for Create Space to do a pretty print version of your book. Just a suggestion there.
