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I wrote and published an ebook - part 2

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Cyberdeth

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After publishing my initial book on amazon, I got a ton of great feedback from the members here and one of the comments were that I should write what people want first. So my second project is starting out pretty good so far. My process so far is:

  1. Find out what the niche is that I want to target. - This is ongoing but I've decided to give Romance a go. - Free!
  2. Get blurbs and book titles and test out what sells. ie. pre-orders. - I enlisted the help from freelance ghostwriters and got a list of book blurbs and titles. This was very cheap ~$50 for 5 blurbs. If I had any imagination at all, I probably could've saved $50 haha
  3. Create book covers using canva - Free!
  4. Create the listings on amazon and set it up for pre-orders. - Free!
  5. Advertise the listings and see what sells. - Amazon was nice enough to give me $100 to advertise for free :) So after I created the pre-order books I started to create advertising campaigns. - Free!
  6. Monitor the ads. - From the ads, I've been able to see the interest in the books via the CTR, I've also had some pre-orders come through (bonus)!
  7. Choose the best performing books to publish. - Once my advertising run is over, I'll choose the 1 or 2 best performing books and enlist the original ghostwriter to write the books.
So, after a month of advertising, I'll probably have a good idea what to publish and what budget to assign for the winning book(s).

I'll keep you posted.
 
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snowbank

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When you look back on your life in 5 or 10 years, will you look to this and say:

A. "I'm super proud of that I'm so glad I did it"
or
B. "Ahh f*ck I can't believe I spent my time doing that when I could have been doing (insert what you actually want to do)

one of the comments were that I should write what people want first

I understand that you believe you are attempting to do this now, but you aren't. You are falling into the very common 'I'm going to be a marketer' and outsource the 'value' - it doesn't qualify.

As Richard Feynman would say: you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

All you're doing is split testing some things(marketing) and then when you think you have convinced the maximum amount of people to buy, you will outsource for a low cost to someone who's low cost because they can't provide high value, and hope this turns into a money maker (your real goal in this). Your goal of focusing on YOU making money, is keeping you from providing value to THEM, which keeps YOU from making money.

Simple game, that you are creating complexity to in the form of misapplication.
 

lowtek

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I'm not arguing you should abandon what you're doing, as you'll learn a few solid lessons if you follow your action plan. Knowing how to split test, market, and outsource some aspects of value creation is valuable, so I would just consider what you're doing a learning experience.

That said, I'm going to share my own anecdote.

For a while I did some freelance writing as a ghostwriter of shovelware Amazon books. I cranked it out as quickly as I could. It was something like $100 per 10,000 words, so how hard do you think I worked on it?

Now, I could have probably made $400 - $500 per book, had I done it all on my own, but I doubt they would still be generating revenue for me. It was thus wasted time and energy, and 4x more so since I took a meager cut.

You're far better off building an audience in a topic is at the intersection of your knowledge / interests and market demand, and then selling them what they want. Yes, this takes time. It's at least a year of struggle with zero pay, more realistically 2 - 3... but the end result is that you're building a personal brand that you can grow and leverage for years to come.

I'm pursing the second route and it's much more fulfilling, and soon to be far more profitable.

Just my $0.02
 

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