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At the time of writing this post and 1 day after the launch of my book, *Blogs Change Lives, it’s ranking #1 in 3 categories and in one Gary V’s ‘Crushing it’ is in #2 position. I don’t expect it to stay like that for very long, but for a moment in history this mama was in top spot.
Writing a book doesn’t have to be the stuff of dreams. Something you would love to do in the future. It can be something you can do now. You can start today, however busy you are. Whatever the demands are on your time, chipping away a little each day will make a difference and it will help you bring your dream to life.
Why I chose to self publish
There’s no doubt that a certain prestige is associated with announcing to the world you have a book deal. This certainly positions your book as a ‘proper’ book. You’ve been given the seal of approval from people who are well positioned to say your idea is good and that it is set for success. They’ll even give you an advance to seal the deal.
I had the idea for my book and along came an opportunity to pitch the idea to an independent publisher at an event I was attending. I pitched it and the publisher loved the idea. I got her card and we communicated via email as I provided her with chapter outlines as requested and then all of a sudden she ghosted me. No response, not even I’ve changed my mind, just nothing. Now I could have started to investigate other publishers to take my idea to, but I started to learn more about self-publishing instead. I was seeing a wave of other entrepreneurs who were self-publishing and didn’t seem to be hung up on the lack of this ‘official approval‘. My mentor Regina, has self-published many books, one of which is her *EPIC BLOG: One-Year Editorial Planner
I have created a business where I can do things on my terms. While I still work with brands, I have my own products and services. So my livelihood is not dependent on the ‘yes we want to work with you‘ from a brand. When I started to think in these terms about my book. Why would I even start looking into traditional publishers? I have a platform, I have good follower numbers. I’m not wet behind the ears in terms on online marketing and product promotion. I was just going to do this myself.
How do you find and organise the content?
As a blogger you will probably have a significant amount of content already out there in the world. As long as this content is relevant to your book topic you can reuse it. So think of blog posts, emails you’ve sent to your list, even those long microblogged captions you’ve put on Instagram. All of these things can be used in some way in your book.
Structure
Open up a Google Doc and think of the story you want to tell. What journey do you want to take your reader on? What transformation do you want them to witness or go through themselves? Every journey has steps. So think of the steps of your particular journey and these become your chapters.
For me, I wanted to start before I started my blog, to give my reader context. The steps I outlined took the readers me not having a blog to having a thriving blog business. So, I needed to break down into chunks of what I would want my reader to know about, with the intention of them having the knowledge required at the end to implement and make it happen for themselves. I also wanted to weave in my own story, so it wasn’t purely practical advice.
After I decided on the chapters, I went on a scavenger hunt for an content I had that could slot into one of these areas. With all of this content in roughly the right place, I then began rewriting, adding in new sections. Generally making it all flow together and make sense in terms of depicting my story as well as giving my readers stacks of actionable advice.
Choose your service
You can publish your book via various different services. I knew I wanted to offer an electronic version and a paperback. Originally I was going to offer the paperback version via CreateSpace who offer print on demand. This means when a customer orders a book it is printed out there and then and shipped to the purchaser. Meaning you don’t have to pay anything up front. The customer pays, the service sort it out and send it, you then get paid a royalty. I then found out Amazon offered the same paperback print on demand service via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). I decided to keep it all in one place and publish both versions with Amazon KDP.
While I was in the process of writing I started work on a few other aspects too.
ISBN
Ebooks don’t need an ISBN number but you will need one for a paperback. You can purchase ISBN numbers for around £80. However, both Create Space and Amazon will give you a free ISBN number to use solely on their platform. Bear in mind that you will not be able to use this ISBN number of you choose to then sell on another platform.
Book cover
I thought about designing the cover myself, I’m not bad on Canva, but I decided, as a cover can make or break a book, I would get a professionally designed cover. I searched designers on Fiverr and similar sites, but to be honest none of them looked any better than something I could do. Then when searching through templates on *Creative Market I found my cover. As soon as I saw it I knew it was perfect for my book. I could have purchased the template for $12 which came with a licence of up to 500 sales. What I did in the end was pay the designer to amend the cover for me (saving me time and stress) and paid for unlimited sales in the licence. He also added in 10 mock up of the book for me to use in promotional posts and it cost $170 all in.
You need to make sure you use all the guides/calculators on the Amazon site to work out exactly what dimensions your cover needs to be. This is very specific. You have to fill in the page colour (white or cream), size and number of pages. It will then give you the specific dimensions.
Additional promotional material
Although I had ten mock ups I purchased some more through Fiverr to make sure I had plenty of variety to use in my social media promotion. This additional 20 cost me £3.47, what a bargain!
While I was on Fiverr I found someone to make me a video book trailer which cost £14.
Formatting
If you are creating an ebook and a paperback book, remember the formatting will be different for each. Paperbacks need to have gutters (the part of the pages which go into the spine) and ebooks don’t. I purchased a template for my paperback from bookdesigntemplates.com. The idea is that chapter by chapter you copy your book into the template which will then be properly formatted depending on the size your selected etc. I think I must have done something wrong when adding my book as it wasn’t accepted my Amazon due to incorrect margins. After around 4 days of trying to upload my book I relented and hired someone on Fiverr.
Hiring the formatter
The formatter saved my life! She was amazing and charged me $50 to correctly reformat the book and it uploaded straight away. Her charge for formatting from scratch was $250 just for your information.
Hiring an editor
You will also need to hire an editor. Editing your own work isn’t really advised as you’re just too close to your own work. I also think our brains fill in the gaps as we know what it says, consequently we don’t read it thoroughly enough. I got quotes of around £800 to edit my 75,000 words. At this point I found a lady on Fiverr who has great 5 star reviews and charged around $250 so I went for it. Sadly, she didn’t do a good job and did a runner! Fiverr gave me my money back and I then hired a lady from my Inner Circle membership to edit it.
Set up Amazon KDP
Setting up your Amazon account is really easy. It’s just a matter of following the steps and it should only take a few minutes. This is where you will upload your book manuscript, choose the categories you want it to appear in, add relevant keywords and set your pricing.
Uploading the assets
When you have your book cover and final manuscripts (ebook and paperback versions if you are doing both) you can upload to your KDP dashboard. They will need to process then you can preview them to make sure everything is correct before you submit them.
Choosing keywords
After you have uploaded your documents you will be able to add in seven keywords to reflect your book. This is just like doing SEO for a blog post. Think of the words which reflect the content of your book.
Selecting the appropriate categories
Although the dashboard only gives you the option to add three categories you can actually email KDP with additional categories (so you are in 10 categories) and they will add them for you. You need to find appropriate but niche categories that your book will fit into. There is no master list available and you will have to find these categories yourself, by doing some detective work.
Use the Amazon search box and start typing in words used to describe your book. You want to find books similar to yours so you can see which categories they are listed in. You can also click on a category and go deeper into the category to find the sub niches. When you email Amazon to add your additional categories they will want the entire string – e.g. Kindle Store : Kindle eBooks : Business & Finance : Small Business & Entrepreneurship.
Top tip – You can increase your chances of becoming a best seller by some further research. Dive into each category on your list (at this point you might have too many and need to reduce them. See which book is ranked #1 and then scroll down to the details for that book, you will see the ABSR number. Repeat this task for each category on your shortlist and make a note of this ABSR number beside each category. Then go to this awesome calculator and one by one pop in the ABSR number. The calculator will tell you the number of copies of that book are being sold each day. So to become a number #1 best seller you need to sell more. These numbers can be really helpful when you are trying to narrow down your category selection.
N.B new books entering categories can change the landscape of a certain category. It is worth noting you can change your categories.
Hidden categories
Let’s chat about the hidden categories! To list your book in certain sub-categories on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, you’ll need to add search keywords to the categories you choose. This article on KDP will show you exactly what you have to do and which categories are affected.
I hope that helps and good luck with writing your book!
If you feel you need more help and support in order to get your book written, then I’d love it if you join my membership community where I can work with you to get your book out into the world. You can check out the details here – The Revolution Inner Circle.
