indie book sales

The Reasons Your Indie Book Isn’t Selling and What to Do About It

Since selling your already self-published book is probably the hardest thing you’ll try to do after changing your own car oil, I’ve compiled some ‘low hanging fruit’ ideas to get you started. If your book has been published through XLibris, Balboa Press, iUnivers, AuthorHouse, etcetera, then the raw cost to you of buying in your book may also be a barrier to making any profits. I heard that a regular trade paperback could be $12 each to buy in! (It should be more like $6 + shipping). Thin Records Could be the Problem If you used a ‘publishing package’ at a big group, then you might have no idea what your book record contains—and thus how poorly it may be filled out. Alas, it may also be an ISBN registered in a foreign land. Once you confirm that booksellers here…
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Apply Unique Selling Strategy to Books

How to Apply a Unique Selling Strategy to Books

One reason that new businesses fail is because they don’t have enough customers… generally because, says Paul Bassat (founder of Seek.com), “They think they are solving a problem… but that problem doesn’t really exist”. An even more common reason is… in the competitive marketplace, they “don’t offer any unique features that others don’t have”. It’s the same with books that help an author’s profile: the book must have a unique angle. Why apply a unique selling point to writing books? When writing a new book, I think about a strong selling point that my book can offer Australians.  For example, the book market is small for Australians looking to grow their money knowhow or micro business. But I don’t worry over that, as there is an advantage in not competing with international finance/business gurus. Instead, I focus on compiling the kind of…
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Royalties for authors

What Can I Expect to Make in Royalties as a First-Time Author?

“The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things.” (Lewis Carroll) Today’s unspeakable thing is what all new authors want to know: how much money will I make as a self-published author?  Will it give me the freedom and riches I truly deserve? The quick answer to the first question is, not much… and the second one is, no, not on its own! Bestselling author Federico Pistoni (of Robots will Steal your Job) agrees with me, and I quote: “Most people don’t make any money writing books, and chances are, you won’t be part of the 0.01% that makes it”.Federico Pistoni Derek of CreativeIndie worked out that only the top .06% of authors actually sell 1,000 books over a period of three months at Amazon – so Fed’s supposition is pretty darn close to statistical averages. Even…
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book attention and publicity

Use your Talents to get Book Attention

You have talents, no doubt. There’s no point in struggling away with the wrong media type when you can use your talent to attract a new, relevant audience for an upcoming book, otherwise known as Book Publicity. If your skill is a visual one especially, perhaps you have clear and large book pictures, then you’ll love this new partnering idea. Not only relevant to securing partnerships, you may use your innate talents to get publicity by: talking about your subject (podcast guest)writing short how-to pieces (guest blog, articles in magazines)making creative short videos to relay a conceptmaking cartoons signifying ideas of yours to put on Instagram Want Publicity? Check this First. If you’ve been only heard of ‘Social Buzz Club’, BookBub and BookBuzz, then this is the level up from that, and just chock-full of Australian ‘cool’. Also, it’s not…
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Balance book - Author interview
Selling eBooks and Media

Life’s Now an Adventure: Book Launch Interview

This is an author interview with Leanne Blaney of Adventure School. What tactics did you use to attract people to your book and listing? Many people have connected on my Podcast, Ignite your Life, so many of the guests were happy to help. I also have a big network of coaches and people I’ve networked with. I did an Amazon Kindle campaign – over a 2-day period, I sent many emails and messages to gather support. The book was not discounted, it was priced at AU$11.99. With the aid of an Amazon expert, we listed in 5-6 categories. It went #1 in two categories (bestseller status) for those days. The categories are: 1. New Age: Mental and Spiritual Healing 2. New Age: Religion and Spirituality It is important to go into the lower niche categories, but the book was also…
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A new tool for creating ebooks / lead magnets

Sometimes a designing service comes up that makes me think: “why did I even bother doing it the hard way?” An online ebook builder (for websites), ‘Designrr’, is making me think this. It’s a simple way of creating a lead magnet — or perhaps a larger ebook for distribution — from your own web pages…. without the stress of learning Adobe InDesign. Feedback from author users leads me to suggest it is not ideal for full Kindle eBooks. You are perhaps best off taking the designed PDF & native file and getting an online freelancer to convert that to your .ePub or .mobi file. Another paid tool for creating ebooks that I’ve used in the past is Jutoh. But Jutoh is not for the fainthearted. It requires knowledge of what to clean up, why tick “make NCX”, and pre-conversion things,…
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