Before I begin, this progress thread is really long because I wanted to give you the full picture, be thorough, and not leave important details out. The link to my original progress thread is https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/pr...ead-pinnacle-financial-education-company.html.
My Background: One of my entrepreneurial goals has always been to develop a financial education academy (offering courses both in residence in local communities and online). I've found that the demands of this undertaking will require creative and hefty pooling of capital. By capital, I do not mean funds. I mean human and other forms of capital. Therefore, I've developed a smaller scale and more easily "bootstrappable" business to leverage my ability to fill the needs of the larger and more involved one.
I've been a writer all my life, but never published anything until 2 years ago. I don't know why. I remember making "A"s on stories I wrote for English and composition classes and how much fun it was to write something for myself when I was at home. It was always enriching to take ideas or fantasies out of my head and put them on paper. I just always kept my writings (screenplays, short and long stories, romantic poetry) to myself. For ten years I've been unlearning all of the indoctrinations of our society involved in the psychological slavery we each at one time were victims of. I self-educated the rest of the way, but it was not until a couple of years ago that I uncovered something greater that my writings could stand for. In 2009, after a year of writing and 10 years of studying, learning, processing, implementing, and making sense of the material, I actually published my first non-fiction book. To those of us who are not authors, it can be a tremendous undertaking that challenges you and pulls at you and requires such time and psychological commitment. Ultimately, anyone can write. It takes a special determination and courage to publish for the world to see.
After a week of patting myself on the back for writing and publishing a book, I then learned the process demands still more to actually get the work into peoples' hands and make a difference...Marketing.
For various reasons, some authors self-publish while others pick a publishing house and submit manuscripts. As you all know, this is where the marketing begins. Traditionally, a publishing house would or could handle all the editing, layout, cover design, marketing and distribution for an author's work. Some charged hefty fees, some did not. My manuscript was accepted by the first publishing house I applied to. It is called Tate Publishing in Mustang, Oklahoma. After acceptance, I was sent a contract to review and sign so Tate could begin processing my manuscript into a book and getting it distributed and marketed. The terms involved upfront payment of an administrative setup fee of about $3,995.00. If and when Tate successfully sold 5,000 copies of my book, I would get that fee back. Since I did not have four grand lying around and it was more than I made in a month at my full-time job, I decided right then to reject the contract and self-publish. I was determined to learn how to sell the 5,000 copies myself and make a much smaller (and doable) upfront investment in the process.
At this time I was reading the 4-Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss opened a chapter by saying that no more that 5% of the books published every year sell more than 5,000 copies. Keep in mind, I was not the average author starting from scratch and never exposed to Fastlane-style education. My fastlane education started over 10 years ago before the Fastlane forum, before 4HWW, and before the last several volumes of the Rich Dad series. I had an edge in knowledge that most authors couldn't fathom. So before reinventing the wheel that other authors are taught to use: send a manuscript to another publisher, get rejected, rinse and repeat, get rejected, then rinse and repeat for weeks and months at a time until I finally break down and self-publish, I self-published immediately. We Fastlaners have specialized education, it was as great a time as any to use it. Even if I had gone to a publisher, in today's world, just finding a good publisher does not guarantee author success as it used to. Even with a publisher, authors still need to market their own work. It was an employee of Tate Publishing itself that made this clear to me through his book marketing blog.
I had no earthly idea that I actually had to market my book with or without a publisher, nor had any idea how to do it. Though this was only 2 years ago, and I'd been a Fastlane student for 8 years up to that point, I did not know how to infuse my enlightened perceptions and knowledge into authoring. I had to learn about my industry...in depth. I read and studied and learned why most authors struggle and do not become the best sellers we hear about or read about in the news (again with the event, not the process). I found out that most authors, through a lack of publicly available training or lack of the will to find answers, follow the same series of steps from writing to selling and get less than mediocre results unless "luck" is somehow involved. I read and studied and learned how consumers shop for books and where they look for them and why they buy certain books over others. I discovered and taught myself why some books sell in great quantity and others do not, what catches the reader's eye in a cover or first sentence of a first chapter, why people read certain genres and not others, what marketing approaches work more effectively than others. One of greatest lessons I learned, however, was that Fastlane education was not enough for what I was doing. I needed specialized industry knowledge to be coupled with it. It was when I obtained this industry knowledge that I was able to fuse it with my Fastlane knowledge and produce a solution - in the form of dedicated process/procedure - that could lead me to predictable, measurable, and scalable success as an author. I have always refused to rely on and pray for "luck". I can't live with myself accepting the idea that I cannot control (or create) my own destiny. I can't do it. I teach myself how to recognize opportunity, then teach myself how to prepare for it, then set up a meeting between them. That's what I do, that's what I was trained to do, that's what I am.
So, like MJ, I started my own publishing business using Fastlane architecture. Now, before I continue...why books and book publishing as my road?
1. Because I'm a skilled author, communicator, and speaker (not because I enjoy writing)
2. Because I've spent a decade studying, dissecting, processing, and learning the implementation of solutions to problems in the world we've been taught are unsolvable. I want to share my findings.
3. I understand it, I can process it easily, it relates to me, it can be naturally Fastlane if executed properly.
One of the most important lessons in turning the writing and selling of your own books into a business is that your book is your product. It is a tangible manifestation of your mind and should be approached with the respect of a scalable, distributable, and controllable infrastructure if you seek to share it with the world. I built a business around my ideas out of respect for my own mind and the minds of my readers.
So, here it is...
The Business/The Product(s): Rich On Your Own Terms, was once just the name of a book. Now it is a brand and a business. Most importantly, it is a state of being. I mentioned a second ago that a book is a tangible manifestation of an author's mind: their thoughts, ideas, education, or imagination. What I realized in building this business was that I actually don't sell books; I sell a state of being. MJ DeMarco sells a lifestyle. Robert Kiyosaki, Napoleon Hill, and others sells a state of mind. JK Rowling, Ann Rule, Stephen King, and others create and sell imagination. I sell, but did not create, a state of being. All I did was name it and package it in an easily deliverable and tangible format so anyone could gain easy and quick access to it. When I realized all of this, everything became clear and attainable.
I wanted this to be an Internet-based business because there was no practical or cost-effective way to implement this as a brick-and-mortar system. So I began building the business into an Internet-based publishing company. Obviously, I built a website. It started out as a blog site. I used a blog format for my site because that's why most authors do. When teaching myself about the industry, this seemed to be one of the parts of the process that resonated most with prospective readers. Authors like Seth Godin, Tony Robbins, and many others would have blogs as their website where visitors could pick up some quality information and hopefully be inspired to buy a book. So, I did the same. I used Google Blogspot for my site because I neither understood WordPress nor had the inclination to learn. (Nothing against Wordpress, this was just me). I was inclined from the beginning to take the road least traveled by fastlaners who create web businesses and not code my own site. Blogspot is a drag-and-drop builder. Thought I have a background in computer technology, it does not involved programming, nor have I ever had a passion for programming. I know enough about coding to manipulate html and css, but not create it and organize it from scratch. Blogspot, at the time, was perfect. The site looked strange to me after a short while. Having a rolling blog as the homepage, where when someone visited they were met with a post, rather than general information about what the site was about. Thought I wrote quality posts (long and short), it still did not feel right. When testing the site after learning a bit of SEO and Internet & social media marketing, I found that visitors did not hang out very long there. It was like walking into the middle of conversation you had no frame of reference for. You did not know what the conversation was about at face value and could not step outside of the box long enough to read what the box said on the outside. It was weird. Nonetheless, I added widgets using the drag-and-drop interface. One widget had a clickable picture of me that led to a short bio I had written. Another was a search widget for browsing posts and pages on the site. Two others held my Facebook and Twitter widgets (I knew well in advance to set up Facebook and Twitter accounts for my and the book, even though peers would suggest it me, I was already ahead of them). Then, of course, there was a widget with a preview of my book, its cover, its price, and a link to its purchase page. I got that book widget from Lulu.com...the original company I self-published through. It's an awesome widget! For the site navigation at the top, I had the typical "about this site/about the author" page, "resources" page for links to sites I drew my inspiration and education from and for further education, "contact us" page. Now, I'm also big into offline marketing...even for web businesses. I suck at Internet marketing. I understand, I can follow the rules and make sense of them, but have not found my touch with its implementation. So most of the books I've sold have been through offline efforts. I drove traffic to my site from Twitter, Facebook, naturally from the Fastlane forum, and offline efforts. I eventually changed my homepage up to give visitors and immediate understanding of what my site was about.
Now, my original goal was to sell 5,000 copies, or make the equivalent in revenue, meaning I had to write down and put that goal in stone. I got distracted with the slow sales progress [not knowing at the time that I needed more sales training] and decided to conceive a new revenue stream.
My new revenue model involved searching for struggling authors and developing a platform for them to reach large pools of their potential readers directly and quickly. This is why I chose CreateSpace - a subsidiary of Amazon helping authors, filmmakers, and musicians publish and distribute their work - to deliver this platform to my potential clients. In a nutshell, I would make money by publishing other authors through selling or leasing them a license of my brand. I still needed a way to sell my book in mass quantity though. What I was not realizing at the time was this revenue model was a huge distraction from my original purpose: giving the world access to the state of being explained in my book. After many poor decisions and distractions that prolonged slow progress, I scrapped my blogspot site. I switched web hosting companies from 1&1 Internet to Fatcow (because of great package deals, great control panel interface, and additional functions I did not have before). Then I used a drag-and-drop site builder called Weebly (available with a Fatcow hosting account) to build my current site. A web business is obviously vastly more than a website. So, here is what I was doing behind the scenes, using the 4-Hour Work Week for guidance:
1. Got a RingCentral account: needed a business phone number for customer inquiries and orders and voice mails. Then I plastered the number on the site.
2. Set up a Google voice phone number: This is my direct line for business contacts...joint venture partnership opportunities, fellow entrepreneurs who need to reach me directly. This keeps my personal cell phone just that: personal.
3. I've had a business domain from day one with business email addresses attached: www.royot.net, bturner@royot.net, orders@royot.net, support@royot.net, etc.
4. Branding: after turning this into a brand, I created a logo with the brand name built-in. I used wordart to take the acronym of the business name and turn it into a logo: Business name is "Rich On Your Own Terms"; acronym is ROYOT, R-O-Y-O-T. Easy to recognize, easy to type-in url, easy to use in slogans, 2 syllables, but sounds a little weird to say. The point is that you'll remember it.
5. Incorporated & secured copyrights & trademarks, secured EIN: Legal business name is ROYOT, LLC; trade name is "Rich On Your Own Terms"
6. Opened a Dropbox account: Build a business, not a job. I need to build systems and sub-systems, I need to build processes and procedures, and controls, then I need to document all of it (through training videos, flowcharts, spreadsheets, tutuorials with screenshots, checklists - still working on all of this). Dropbox's role is to organize the documented systems of my business. I use it daily.
7. Education: Joined TaxLoopholes.com, SmartPassiveIncome.com, been a member of the Fastlane forum, buy books on Amazon...from author websites...from Barnes & Noble whenever I need a specific resource, read Maui Mastermind publications, reread 4-Hour Work Week & Rich Dad books, & self-help books, & Millionaire Fastlane . I eat, sleep, and drink this lifestyle and love every second of it.
8. Got a business mailing address (P.O. Box) because it is Internet-based...no more correspondence or packages coming to my house
9. Shopping cart software via E-Junkie (suggested by Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com)...fantastic resource. Extremely inexpensive, effective. E-junkie Shopping Cart for selling downloads & tangible goods.
10. Set up Paypal and Google Checkout accounts.
11. Bought a SiteLock certificate to secure the site from hacks and viruses that can be delivered to visitors.
12. Bought a Geotrust certificate to secure the financial data of my customers all the way through the checkout process.
13. There's much more, but you get the idea.
As for the product itself, I calculated the cost of printing the book based on page count, black-and-white vs. color printing, type of binding, etc. Createspace and Lulu were huge helps in this. I had to calculate what books of the same characteristics sell for. On average, a book like mine retails for between $17.95 on the low end all the way up to $26.95 or sometimes more. With the size of this range, I quickly discovered that content and genre play a massive role in retail pricing on books. I priced it mid-range. Without having the middleman of a traditional publisher in my way, on top of building a business of my own, my profit margins are significantly higher than other authors. This frees up cash flow for me to invest in other areas of the business, including product improvements and special offers to customers. I've re-released the book in paperback and digital format at least 3 times this year alone from any number of improvement suggestions by readers. I want a direct relationship with my reader, so individual opinions from my buyers matter more than any other. I treat my book like I would any product: I get feedback from my customers, implement suggested improvements, and re-release it. Each re-release is an updated edition of the book and I do not charge for these. When I release future volumes, however - because this book is part of a series I'm planning - then there is a charge. I can do this because of control. For example, when you buy your copy of my paperback book, the digital copy is included for free and available for immediate download following purchase. I am able to do this because of control. When you purchase either one of my books (I published a second one), you receive credit toward free gasoline or free groceries. I am able to do this because of leverage: fewer middlemen delivers higher profit margins and more cash flow to leverage into special offers such as these. [By the way, I love the fastlane.] I have Kindle versions of my books for sale, which are watered down, and general availability on Amazon. I control the distribution and love it. Most sales come from my site because of the high incentives customers get from buying directly from my publishing business. I credit Kindle purchases to the purchase of full versions of my books on the website.
All-in-all, I'm at the point in my fastlane journey where the focus is to generate sales, automate, and recruit.
My Background: One of my entrepreneurial goals has always been to develop a financial education academy (offering courses both in residence in local communities and online). I've found that the demands of this undertaking will require creative and hefty pooling of capital. By capital, I do not mean funds. I mean human and other forms of capital. Therefore, I've developed a smaller scale and more easily "bootstrappable" business to leverage my ability to fill the needs of the larger and more involved one.
I've been a writer all my life, but never published anything until 2 years ago. I don't know why. I remember making "A"s on stories I wrote for English and composition classes and how much fun it was to write something for myself when I was at home. It was always enriching to take ideas or fantasies out of my head and put them on paper. I just always kept my writings (screenplays, short and long stories, romantic poetry) to myself. For ten years I've been unlearning all of the indoctrinations of our society involved in the psychological slavery we each at one time were victims of. I self-educated the rest of the way, but it was not until a couple of years ago that I uncovered something greater that my writings could stand for. In 2009, after a year of writing and 10 years of studying, learning, processing, implementing, and making sense of the material, I actually published my first non-fiction book. To those of us who are not authors, it can be a tremendous undertaking that challenges you and pulls at you and requires such time and psychological commitment. Ultimately, anyone can write. It takes a special determination and courage to publish for the world to see.
After a week of patting myself on the back for writing and publishing a book, I then learned the process demands still more to actually get the work into peoples' hands and make a difference...Marketing.
For various reasons, some authors self-publish while others pick a publishing house and submit manuscripts. As you all know, this is where the marketing begins. Traditionally, a publishing house would or could handle all the editing, layout, cover design, marketing and distribution for an author's work. Some charged hefty fees, some did not. My manuscript was accepted by the first publishing house I applied to. It is called Tate Publishing in Mustang, Oklahoma. After acceptance, I was sent a contract to review and sign so Tate could begin processing my manuscript into a book and getting it distributed and marketed. The terms involved upfront payment of an administrative setup fee of about $3,995.00. If and when Tate successfully sold 5,000 copies of my book, I would get that fee back. Since I did not have four grand lying around and it was more than I made in a month at my full-time job, I decided right then to reject the contract and self-publish. I was determined to learn how to sell the 5,000 copies myself and make a much smaller (and doable) upfront investment in the process.
At this time I was reading the 4-Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss opened a chapter by saying that no more that 5% of the books published every year sell more than 5,000 copies. Keep in mind, I was not the average author starting from scratch and never exposed to Fastlane-style education. My fastlane education started over 10 years ago before the Fastlane forum, before 4HWW, and before the last several volumes of the Rich Dad series. I had an edge in knowledge that most authors couldn't fathom. So before reinventing the wheel that other authors are taught to use: send a manuscript to another publisher, get rejected, rinse and repeat, get rejected, then rinse and repeat for weeks and months at a time until I finally break down and self-publish, I self-published immediately. We Fastlaners have specialized education, it was as great a time as any to use it. Even if I had gone to a publisher, in today's world, just finding a good publisher does not guarantee author success as it used to. Even with a publisher, authors still need to market their own work. It was an employee of Tate Publishing itself that made this clear to me through his book marketing blog.
I had no earthly idea that I actually had to market my book with or without a publisher, nor had any idea how to do it. Though this was only 2 years ago, and I'd been a Fastlane student for 8 years up to that point, I did not know how to infuse my enlightened perceptions and knowledge into authoring. I had to learn about my industry...in depth. I read and studied and learned why most authors struggle and do not become the best sellers we hear about or read about in the news (again with the event, not the process). I found out that most authors, through a lack of publicly available training or lack of the will to find answers, follow the same series of steps from writing to selling and get less than mediocre results unless "luck" is somehow involved. I read and studied and learned how consumers shop for books and where they look for them and why they buy certain books over others. I discovered and taught myself why some books sell in great quantity and others do not, what catches the reader's eye in a cover or first sentence of a first chapter, why people read certain genres and not others, what marketing approaches work more effectively than others. One of greatest lessons I learned, however, was that Fastlane education was not enough for what I was doing. I needed specialized industry knowledge to be coupled with it. It was when I obtained this industry knowledge that I was able to fuse it with my Fastlane knowledge and produce a solution - in the form of dedicated process/procedure - that could lead me to predictable, measurable, and scalable success as an author. I have always refused to rely on and pray for "luck". I can't live with myself accepting the idea that I cannot control (or create) my own destiny. I can't do it. I teach myself how to recognize opportunity, then teach myself how to prepare for it, then set up a meeting between them. That's what I do, that's what I was trained to do, that's what I am.
So, like MJ, I started my own publishing business using Fastlane architecture. Now, before I continue...why books and book publishing as my road?
1. Because I'm a skilled author, communicator, and speaker (not because I enjoy writing)
2. Because I've spent a decade studying, dissecting, processing, and learning the implementation of solutions to problems in the world we've been taught are unsolvable. I want to share my findings.
3. I understand it, I can process it easily, it relates to me, it can be naturally Fastlane if executed properly.
One of the most important lessons in turning the writing and selling of your own books into a business is that your book is your product. It is a tangible manifestation of your mind and should be approached with the respect of a scalable, distributable, and controllable infrastructure if you seek to share it with the world. I built a business around my ideas out of respect for my own mind and the minds of my readers.
So, here it is...
The Business/The Product(s): Rich On Your Own Terms, was once just the name of a book. Now it is a brand and a business. Most importantly, it is a state of being. I mentioned a second ago that a book is a tangible manifestation of an author's mind: their thoughts, ideas, education, or imagination. What I realized in building this business was that I actually don't sell books; I sell a state of being. MJ DeMarco sells a lifestyle. Robert Kiyosaki, Napoleon Hill, and others sells a state of mind. JK Rowling, Ann Rule, Stephen King, and others create and sell imagination. I sell, but did not create, a state of being. All I did was name it and package it in an easily deliverable and tangible format so anyone could gain easy and quick access to it. When I realized all of this, everything became clear and attainable.
I wanted this to be an Internet-based business because there was no practical or cost-effective way to implement this as a brick-and-mortar system. So I began building the business into an Internet-based publishing company. Obviously, I built a website. It started out as a blog site. I used a blog format for my site because that's why most authors do. When teaching myself about the industry, this seemed to be one of the parts of the process that resonated most with prospective readers. Authors like Seth Godin, Tony Robbins, and many others would have blogs as their website where visitors could pick up some quality information and hopefully be inspired to buy a book. So, I did the same. I used Google Blogspot for my site because I neither understood WordPress nor had the inclination to learn. (Nothing against Wordpress, this was just me). I was inclined from the beginning to take the road least traveled by fastlaners who create web businesses and not code my own site. Blogspot is a drag-and-drop builder. Thought I have a background in computer technology, it does not involved programming, nor have I ever had a passion for programming. I know enough about coding to manipulate html and css, but not create it and organize it from scratch. Blogspot, at the time, was perfect. The site looked strange to me after a short while. Having a rolling blog as the homepage, where when someone visited they were met with a post, rather than general information about what the site was about. Thought I wrote quality posts (long and short), it still did not feel right. When testing the site after learning a bit of SEO and Internet & social media marketing, I found that visitors did not hang out very long there. It was like walking into the middle of conversation you had no frame of reference for. You did not know what the conversation was about at face value and could not step outside of the box long enough to read what the box said on the outside. It was weird. Nonetheless, I added widgets using the drag-and-drop interface. One widget had a clickable picture of me that led to a short bio I had written. Another was a search widget for browsing posts and pages on the site. Two others held my Facebook and Twitter widgets (I knew well in advance to set up Facebook and Twitter accounts for my and the book, even though peers would suggest it me, I was already ahead of them). Then, of course, there was a widget with a preview of my book, its cover, its price, and a link to its purchase page. I got that book widget from Lulu.com...the original company I self-published through. It's an awesome widget! For the site navigation at the top, I had the typical "about this site/about the author" page, "resources" page for links to sites I drew my inspiration and education from and for further education, "contact us" page. Now, I'm also big into offline marketing...even for web businesses. I suck at Internet marketing. I understand, I can follow the rules and make sense of them, but have not found my touch with its implementation. So most of the books I've sold have been through offline efforts. I drove traffic to my site from Twitter, Facebook, naturally from the Fastlane forum, and offline efforts. I eventually changed my homepage up to give visitors and immediate understanding of what my site was about.
Now, my original goal was to sell 5,000 copies, or make the equivalent in revenue, meaning I had to write down and put that goal in stone. I got distracted with the slow sales progress [not knowing at the time that I needed more sales training] and decided to conceive a new revenue stream.
My new revenue model involved searching for struggling authors and developing a platform for them to reach large pools of their potential readers directly and quickly. This is why I chose CreateSpace - a subsidiary of Amazon helping authors, filmmakers, and musicians publish and distribute their work - to deliver this platform to my potential clients. In a nutshell, I would make money by publishing other authors through selling or leasing them a license of my brand. I still needed a way to sell my book in mass quantity though. What I was not realizing at the time was this revenue model was a huge distraction from my original purpose: giving the world access to the state of being explained in my book. After many poor decisions and distractions that prolonged slow progress, I scrapped my blogspot site. I switched web hosting companies from 1&1 Internet to Fatcow (because of great package deals, great control panel interface, and additional functions I did not have before). Then I used a drag-and-drop site builder called Weebly (available with a Fatcow hosting account) to build my current site. A web business is obviously vastly more than a website. So, here is what I was doing behind the scenes, using the 4-Hour Work Week for guidance:
1. Got a RingCentral account: needed a business phone number for customer inquiries and orders and voice mails. Then I plastered the number on the site.
2. Set up a Google voice phone number: This is my direct line for business contacts...joint venture partnership opportunities, fellow entrepreneurs who need to reach me directly. This keeps my personal cell phone just that: personal.
3. I've had a business domain from day one with business email addresses attached: www.royot.net, bturner@royot.net, orders@royot.net, support@royot.net, etc.
4. Branding: after turning this into a brand, I created a logo with the brand name built-in. I used wordart to take the acronym of the business name and turn it into a logo: Business name is "Rich On Your Own Terms"; acronym is ROYOT, R-O-Y-O-T. Easy to recognize, easy to type-in url, easy to use in slogans, 2 syllables, but sounds a little weird to say. The point is that you'll remember it.
5. Incorporated & secured copyrights & trademarks, secured EIN: Legal business name is ROYOT, LLC; trade name is "Rich On Your Own Terms"
6. Opened a Dropbox account: Build a business, not a job. I need to build systems and sub-systems, I need to build processes and procedures, and controls, then I need to document all of it (through training videos, flowcharts, spreadsheets, tutuorials with screenshots, checklists - still working on all of this). Dropbox's role is to organize the documented systems of my business. I use it daily.
7. Education: Joined TaxLoopholes.com, SmartPassiveIncome.com, been a member of the Fastlane forum, buy books on Amazon...from author websites...from Barnes & Noble whenever I need a specific resource, read Maui Mastermind publications, reread 4-Hour Work Week & Rich Dad books, & self-help books, & Millionaire Fastlane . I eat, sleep, and drink this lifestyle and love every second of it.
8. Got a business mailing address (P.O. Box) because it is Internet-based...no more correspondence or packages coming to my house
9. Shopping cart software via E-Junkie (suggested by Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com)...fantastic resource. Extremely inexpensive, effective. E-junkie Shopping Cart for selling downloads & tangible goods.
10. Set up Paypal and Google Checkout accounts.
11. Bought a SiteLock certificate to secure the site from hacks and viruses that can be delivered to visitors.
12. Bought a Geotrust certificate to secure the financial data of my customers all the way through the checkout process.
13. There's much more, but you get the idea.
As for the product itself, I calculated the cost of printing the book based on page count, black-and-white vs. color printing, type of binding, etc. Createspace and Lulu were huge helps in this. I had to calculate what books of the same characteristics sell for. On average, a book like mine retails for between $17.95 on the low end all the way up to $26.95 or sometimes more. With the size of this range, I quickly discovered that content and genre play a massive role in retail pricing on books. I priced it mid-range. Without having the middleman of a traditional publisher in my way, on top of building a business of my own, my profit margins are significantly higher than other authors. This frees up cash flow for me to invest in other areas of the business, including product improvements and special offers to customers. I've re-released the book in paperback and digital format at least 3 times this year alone from any number of improvement suggestions by readers. I want a direct relationship with my reader, so individual opinions from my buyers matter more than any other. I treat my book like I would any product: I get feedback from my customers, implement suggested improvements, and re-release it. Each re-release is an updated edition of the book and I do not charge for these. When I release future volumes, however - because this book is part of a series I'm planning - then there is a charge. I can do this because of control. For example, when you buy your copy of my paperback book, the digital copy is included for free and available for immediate download following purchase. I am able to do this because of control. When you purchase either one of my books (I published a second one), you receive credit toward free gasoline or free groceries. I am able to do this because of leverage: fewer middlemen delivers higher profit margins and more cash flow to leverage into special offers such as these. [By the way, I love the fastlane.] I have Kindle versions of my books for sale, which are watered down, and general availability on Amazon. I control the distribution and love it. Most sales come from my site because of the high incentives customers get from buying directly from my publishing business. I credit Kindle purchases to the purchase of full versions of my books on the website.
All-in-all, I'm at the point in my fastlane journey where the focus is to generate sales, automate, and recruit.
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- Proven Strategies: Learn from the best in the business, with actionable advice and strategies that can accelerate your success.
"You are the average of the five people you surround yourself with the most..."
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