Self-Publishing Secrets, 7 Steps To A Six-Figure Self Publishing Empire

Self Publishing in my view is possibly one of the most lucrative business models on the Internet. It’s often ignored by many people as it “smacks” of “hard work”. I mean, all that self-publishing malarkey just sounds a little bit too hard, doesn’t it?

I think a year or two ago I would have probably agreed with you. However, since delving in and diving into the self-publishing business, I see it as a way to produce generational wealth and a hefty smattering of internet cash plowing into our bank account. Trust me, I do not say this lightly, as a person who has been in many, many businesses over the last 40 years, including many online businesses.. this really could be your passport to freedom.

Why Most Internet-Based Businesses Go Down The Plughole

Think about it..

Let’s look at why many internet-based businesses fail.

It’s usually because of these three words, lack of TRAFFIC..

Not enough eyeballs..

Traffic, or rather the lack of it stops a lot of would-be Internet entrepreneurs from succeeding. Usually, people can’t get enough hits on their website or prospects through the door to convert many, or any of them into customers. This is the cold hard truth. It’s rarely the fault of the business, it’s nearly always the lack of traffic.

Making money online as a business has a 97% failure rate. If people spent 90% of the time getting eyeballs on their content instead of attending webinars, doing courses, twiddling with the website, etc, I think the success rate would be a lot higher.

Hence, this is why Self-Publishing starts you off with a big advantage straight away. You don’t have to barter or beg to get customers. The BIG advantage of Amazon’s massive traffic is that most of the eyeballs on Amazon’s sites is actually buyer traffic. Now all you have to do is come up with a book that people want, or, of course, get the book written for you.

My book, Self-Publishing Secrets goes into this in more detail but here is the basic formula to make this business work.

Self-Publishing Success – The Basic Formula

Step 1. Create your first manuscript yourself. This should be a nonfiction book based on a popular niche. Nonfiction is mainly there to provide answers and solve people’s problems and BOY, people have a ton of problems. Pick one problem and create a book around solving that one problem.

There are various tools and ways to determine a popular niche. I tend to dive into the niche itself and find sub-niches that are not so competitive.

Step 2. Create a book of around 30,000 words or more. This might sound like a lot of words but it’s around the length of 30 decent-sized blog posts. The length of the book is important, as later we will be converting it into an Audiobook, and a 30,000-word audiobook takes us to the magic 3hr mark on audible, this is a good price point for us.

Step 3. Once your manuscript is finished, you will need it to be ready for publishing. This involves formatting your manuscript and getting it edited. You don’t want to submit a manuscript to amazon that is full of spelling mistakes or bad grammar.

Step 4. Create a great book cover. I wouldn’t attempt to do this yourself unless you have graphic design skills. There are plenty of good designers out there who can do this for you. Prices vary, and so does quality, so pick a designer who will really make your book “Pop”.

Step 5. Publish your book as a Kindle book on Amazon. Enroll it into the Kindle Select program, this is where Amazon lends your book to people who subscribe to their Kindle Unlimited, and you get a small payment per page read. This really is money for nothing. You do, however, have to commit it to sell on Amazon only, for 90 days.

Self-Publishing – Show Me The Money

Step 6. Publish your book as a paperback. You can actually publish your book in three different formats on KDP Amazon, (Kindle Direct Publishing). Kindle (eBook), paperback, and hardback. Publishing on Amazon is free, you don’t have to buy any books yourself unless you want to. As your books sell, Amazon prints them by print on demand, and then sends them to the customer.

For Kindle book sales priced between $2.99 and $9.99, you will receive a 70% royalty, for paperbacks and hardbacks you receive a 60% royalty (after printing costs).

Step 7. Once you have published your book as a Kindle, you can then turn your book into an Audiobook. You do this over at ACX.com This is the publishing platform for Audible. Amazon owns Audible.

On ACX, you will find a narrator to narrate your book. There are many to choose from and narrators charge between $50 and $250 per finished hour. The average is around $100 per finished hour, Your 30,000-word book will produce approximately 3hrs of audio. So expect to pay around $300 for a complete Audiobook.

Self Publishing Audiobooks On Audible

Once your audiobook has been published by ACX, it will appear on audible.com and audible.co.uk. It will also appear on your Amazon book listings.

You now have 4 different modalities to sell your book. Imagine if you had created 10 books, you would have 40 different products out there on Amazon and Audible. Now we need to help the book along by marketing the book ourselves. We need to get reviews and generally tell everyone we can, that we have a book out there. Facebook is a good place to start. We do that by creating a Facebook group for people in the niche of your book and then giving them good content on a daily basis.

It’s always a two-way street. Although they are doing you a massive favor, don’t forget to do something for them when you can. P.S Don’t incentivize reviews, it goes against Amazon’s terms of service.

We then ask them via messenger if they would like a free copy of our book in exchange for an honest review. Some will, some won’t. This is fine, it’s purely a numbers game. When you have 10 -15 reviews on your book, you might want to use Amazon advertising to help advertise your books.

Marketing your book is all trial and error (more about this in my book) however as you publish your first book you will get to know what works and what doesn’t work. I tend to use a mixture of Amazon ads for each new book and I also advertise my books on my blog and Social Media.

Self Publishing Books On Amazon – The Big Sell Off

Slowly over time you will accumulate a lot of digital assets. If you create your own books and have a Ghostwriter creating books at the same time, between you, you can possibly create 8 to 10 – 30,000 word books a year. I know this is possible as I have done this in the last year and NO, I’m not a professional writer.

You can then, after perhaps 3 or 4 years sell the whole lot as a going concern. On empireflippers.com you can sell the assets (your books, your email list, etc). People have been known to pay 40 – 50 times the monthly income for a good self-publishing business. There are lots of people out there willing to buy a self-publishing business as a large majority of this business can run passively.

That values a $10,000 a month KDP business at around $400k to $500k.

Whatever you decide to do, running your own self-publishing business can be fun and extremely profitable if you are prepared to work at it. You may want to do it part-time or full-time. You can hire a ghostwriter to write your books if you want, but I would always advise that you to at least write your first book, as this will take you through the entire process.

I hope you have enjoyed this post, if you have, please leave a comment below and share the post.

Have a great day

Keith

P.S For more information on my latest book “Self-Publishing Secrets”, click this link or click the image below