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The method outlined in this guide requires no marketing or advertising, because that's done for you by Amazon. They will promote you hard, for free, because they want your product to sell, and they reach millions of people a day.
No, I'm not going to tell you to re-sell other people's books. The way to earn real cash on Amazon is by publishing books yourself. This is an easy process, and I'm going to show you how to create an entire book in a single day, from start to finish. If you can publish a book a day, you can publish 30 books in a month, and your earnings will increase exponentially.
But first I'm going to show you why this method works so well, why the market isn't saturated, and the big secret that most self-publishers don't know. I'm also going to show you exactly how to design a book, how to find the right niches to write about, and how to get your books ranking high on Amazon.
Why this method works
If you've done any internet marketing, you know how hard it is to drive traffic to your unknown site or product. It takes time, money, and effort. When you publish a book on Amazon, all of that work disappears. You publish the book, and you're done. They deal with marketing, advertising, refunds, support, and mailing out the books. You sit back and enjoy the monthly royalty checks. You write one book in one day, and take in royalties from that for years to come. Of course, to get the most out of this method, you'll want to build an army of titles: 20-50.
Question: If it's so easy, why isn't the market saturated?
Answer: Because most people don't know what they're doing. They have issues with the technical aspect of self-publishing (which you will see is very pain-free if you tackle it the right way), they don't realize which books sell and which don't, and most importantly, they don't know the big secret that will enable them to write a book a day.
To make great money self-publishing on Amazon, you need to publish at least 15 books. To most people, that sounds like a task that would take 5 or 10 years, or more. Most people don't want to devote that much time, understandably. Because people don't know how to publish a book a day, they aren't jumping onto this royalty machine – it looks like too much work. That's why the market isn't saturated, and that's why you can still make great money with this method.
Question: How many books do I need to publish to make this worth my time?
Answer: The more books you publish, obviously the more money you will make. But here's a very rough guide to how many books you'll need to publish to make the income you're looking for:
5 books = 1,050 per month
10 books = 2,100 per month
20 books = 4,200 per month
50 books = 10,500 per month
100 books = 21,000 per month
This isn't exact, but it is roughly accurate, depending on the price you decide to sell your book at, and the type and quality of books you publish.
Question: Will I need to get reviews to sell books?
Answer: You'll sell more books if you have reviews, yes. I'll show you exactly how to get tons of reviews quickly and for free.
Why selling on Amazon should be a no-brainer
Amazon gets over 40 million hits per month.
They rank at #33 on Alexa.com.
They have a page rank of 9.
You can't do better than Amazon for selling your books. And the best part is that they market your books for you. They will show your book's listing under the listings of dozens of other similar books. They will put you on the front page and recommend your book to customers. They have a mind-blowing mailing list full of people who trust them, and they're sending them recommendations to go buy your book. And you pay nothing for this invaluable, automatic marketing tool that is Amazon.
Also, because Google trusts Amazon so much, your book can easily become the first listing on Google for your title's keywords, sometimes in as little as a day.
Getting Started
A basic outline of the publishing process
1. The website you will use to publish your books is createspace.com (it's a subsidiary of Amazon). When you submit your book to them, they will review it, check to make sure it's all ready to print, and then you can order a proof copy. Proof copies cost about $3 plus shipping. You'll receive the proof copy within 2-3 business days, but they tell you it can take several weeks. I've never had a proof take longer than 4 days to receive.
2. After you've checked the proof to make sure it looks like it should, go into your account and check off the box that says you're satisfied with your proof. Now Createspace will automatically submit your book to Amazon, and within a week your book will be available to buy on Amazon. Exciting!
3. Now that your book is available, you need reviews and tags. One way to get these is to post to
forums and say you're giving away free copies of your book in exchange for reviews and tags, but let them know that you're only giving away the ebook version, not the actual print copy.
4. Another way to get reviews and tags is to go to this "Book Review Club" thread on the Createspace forum and offer your book for review in exchange for giving others reviews: https://www.createspace.com/en/community/thread/2212?tstart=0
5. You are done. Time to get started on your next book.
Designing your books
The first thing I want to go over is that using Photoshop to design your books is by far the easiest route you can take. Photoshop is extremely easy to obtain on torrent sites or you can get a 30 day trial at adobe.com. You can easily publish 20 books in the 30 day trial if you set yourself to the task.
Since I don't use any other method to publish books, I'm only going to be showing you how to create a book using Photoshop. Any version of Photoshop will work for this.
First, you'll need a template for your book. Go to: https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/
Scroll down to the bottom, until you see "Configure your template." Choose 6x9, black and white with bleed, and paper color should be white. The number of pages will vary, obviously.
In case you want to know why we chose these settings:
We chose 6x9 because it's the standard size for a book. Black and white because color books are too expensive to make a nice profit from; bleed because if you don't choose bleed you'll have a hassle putting any designs in your book. You'll need the paper color to be white because we're designing in Photoshop, and will be using white as our background, since we don't know the exact shade of cream Createspace uses in books.
Now open the Photoshop template in Photoshop. You'll see your template as a layer called "guides." The template is self-explanatory. Use the guides to design the front and back cover of your book. Remember to delete the "guides" layer before you submit this to Createspace.
I would like to interject here that if you don't know how to use Photoshop, there are many great tutorials on YouTube, and also that you only need very basic knowledge of Photoshop to create a book. If you're still not comfortable with it, hire someone from elance.com to design it. The artists there are desperate for work and are willing to do it very cheaply.
Now that you've designed the cover, crop the document so that only the cover shows, with no white space in the background, and save it as a PDF (this is an option in the drop down list in Photoshop when you choose "save as"). When saving it as a PDF, click on "Compression" on the left side, and then choose Image Quality: High.
Next, crop out the back cover. Just keep the front cover. Erase everything on the cover and save it as "interior-template.psd." Now you have a template for the inside as well. From here, it's simple. Just copy and paste your book onto the Photoshop document.
When you've finished a page, save as "page1.pdf" and then "page2.pdf" until you've done all the pages. When you're saving the pages of the books as PDF, save them at medium high compression, not higher or lower.
Another interjection: This may sound like a lot of work in text, but that's just because I'm trying to be
extremely thorough in my explanation, because I don't want you to get stuck at any point. Once you've done this process once, you'll find it quick and easy to repeat.
The big secret
Here is how you're going to pump out book after book without breaking a sweat:
You're going to sell books with lists of ideas.
Examples: 101 Ways to Market Your Website for Free, 52 Ways to Be More Creative, 36 Ways to Be More Outgoing.
What's so great about this? Each page is a simple idea. Instead of churning out page after page of text, while checking your word count, you're putting a single idea – 2-7 sentences – on each page. And your audience is all the happier for it.
Here's an example from one of my own books about marketing your jewelry shop that sells between 3 – 6 copies per day:
There are four sentences on that page. Do people mind? No! This is exactly what they want. Quick, easy, and informative. They don't want to sift through all your filler and fluff any more than you want to write it.
Where to get the ideas/information
The best way to obtain the ideas to use in your books is to visit forums.
Don't look for articles – most of the time articles are written by people who only barely know the subject they're talking about and have no original ideas.
Forums are full of people who really care about the topic, many of them are experts, and they don't post re-hashed information because they'd look like a fool. You'll find a treasure trove of useful, original ideas in forums.
All the odds and ends
We've gone through all the important subjects, but there are other things you should know before you start creating books for Amazon.
Titles: You need to use very long subtitles on your books. Keep the title on your cover simple, but give it a subtitle that uses as many related keywords as you can without looking spammy. Here's the title of the book I used in my example:
101 Ways to Market Your Online Jewelry Shop: Free and Cheap Ways to Market, Promote, Advertise, and Increase Traffic to Your Online or Etsy Jewelry Shop and Sell Your Jewelry Now
Royalties: Createspace/Amazon take out about half the cost of the list price of your book. So if you're selling your book for $20, you'll receive $10 in royalties. In the rough guide I used to answer the "How many books do I have to publish to make this worth my time?" question, I made the presumption that you would sell 1 copy of each book every day for $14 and make a $7 royalty. Obviously you can sell your book for much more or much less than this.
Getting paid: Createspace pays by direct deposit or check around the end of the month following the month you made sales. For example, you sold 1000 books at $14 each in February. At the end of March you'll receive $7,000.
Making changes: It's a pain to make changes via Createspace, so I recommend you use Amazon Advantage. It's free for a trial period of 1-2 months, and it's $30 a year after that. It allows you to change the cover image for your book, write longer descriptions, include reviews in the description section, add your blog to the description section, and change the title. Find it at advantage.amazon.com.
How many sales you can expect: The first couple of weeks you publish your book, sales might be a little slow. But after a month or two you should expect to consistently sell 1 copy per day of each book. That's about average – some books will do better and some worse. Does it not sound like much? That's why you need to publish dozens of books. If you sell just 1 copy every day of 20 titles, you'll make
$4,200 a month. And after all 20 of those titles are up on Amazon, you're done. You can just sit back and enjoy the royalties for years.
Finding ideas for topics: If you're stumped on topics, try looking at the Amazon top 100 selling books here: [ame="http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books"]Amazon.com Bestsellers: The most popular items in Books. Updated hourly.[/ame] Now, look through the titles and see what people are interested in. Right now I see a book about giving foolproof presentations, one on how to stop procrastinating, and one on how to be a better father. So, here are the books you could write: 37 Ways to Give Outstanding Presentations, 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Stop Procrastinating, and 50 Fun and Adventurous Ways to Spend Time with Your Kids.
In summary:
1. Think of a topic.
2. Search forums for original ideas on the topic and keep the best.
3. Write these ideas in your own words.
4. Put these words onto pages in Photoshop.
5. Design cover.
6. Submit cover and pages to Createspace.
7. Receive proof copy and check box indicating satisfaction with proof.
8. Your book goes live on Amazon in a week or less.
9. Obtain reviews and tags for your book.
10. Rinse and repeat.
For just 1 month of work, you can have a consistent, passive, high income for years. You don't have to break any rules or use any sneaky methods, so you'll never have to worry about being shut down. Keep in mind that this method can become saturated if too many people become aware of it, so try to keep it to yourself, for your own sake as well as others. |
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发表于 2012-5-21 02:14:54
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