How To Successfully Self-Publish Books With a Small Platform (Part 4)

Here we are in part four in this series on how to self-publish books when you don’t have a huge audience. Don’t forget that tonight I’m hosting a free webinar where I’ll be continuing this series, answering your questions and telling you about an amazing opportunity to be a part of a live demo. Details here

What I hope you take away from this series is that your first book isn’t “it.” This first book is just the foundation that you need to build on and create a real business from. My first book flopped but I got back up and self-published a second book and created an online business that supports our family so well, we were able to move to Maui, Hawaii.

I didn’t and still don’t have a huge audience, that’s how I know you can do this too. After this series is over, I’ll be having a couple of follow-up posts that talk about how to self-publish a book: who to hire for editing and formatting, what you should price your book. I’ll also be talking about KDP Select and a few other things related to self-publishing.

If you want more specific help, I do offer coaching and have helped many authors self-publish their books and do well. I myself have self-published two books that have sold over 82,000 copies, so I know a little about this stuff  Let’s pick up where we left off:

9. Set up spots on local TV. Despite the popularity of the Internet, people still watch TV. There’s an untapped opportunity that we miss because we think it’s impossible: being interviewed on your TV local stations. Think about how much content your local Fox or CBS (and so on) affiliate has to fill, they’re always looking for good content.

The key is having a good hook, something that garbs attention or causes controversy. There’s a strategy for how to get booked but I won’t share that here, I’m saving that for a special bonus Even with a self-published book, you can print out physical copies through a few places and bring them on one of your local stations.

10. Launch the books for 4 days: Tuesday through Friday. When we see the A-Listers launch a book, they usually use the whole week, the reason they’re doing that is to make the New York Times best-sellers list, that’s not our goal (YET!). For smaller platform launches, you don’t need a full week, three to four days max. I say launch on a Tuesday and end on a Friday.

Monday: everyone is returning to work and starting their week, they’re not going to be thinking about your book. Once Saturday hits: people are thinking about how they will enjoy their weekend, again, they’re not going to be thinking about your book. Tuesday through Friday is a solid four days when you have a chance to get their attention. It’s also shorter, you can drive sales and possibly reach number in a category on Amazon during those days.

I don’t believe it will help your sales to claim number one, the average book buyer isn’t going to decide to buy your book because it was number one in wood-craving on Amazon. It’s something good you can leverage to get interviews and guest posts on larger sites. We will promote hard during those 4 days and have the launch team do the same.

The best approach during those four days is to have your launch team stagger their marketing. See how many people you have on your team, divide that number up by four and have a certain group of people promote each day. That way if there’s some people who have some cross over with their audiences, the audience isn’t overwhelmed with your book.

If you listen to a lot of podcasts, you’ve probably seen a trend lately. A person who has a large following is releasing a book or product and they go on all the podcasts you listen to from other A-Listers. When you look at your podcast app, it’s the same person being interviewed on all ten podcasts you listen to. Once you listen to them one time, you delete all the other shows because you don’t need to hear that same person ten times.

That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid during launch week. We don’t want people to get sick of us or our book. Having a staggered approach will help with this, plus it will help bring consistent sales everyday during those four days of the launch. That way you can reach number one in a bunch of different categories. Make sense?

11. Package and launch your other products and services. We’ve talked about this but with all the exposure during launch week, you should package and promote your other stuff. Can you offer a discount on your coaching services? How about speaking at a local business function if they buy a certain number of books during launch?

The point is to get create and let the world know about all that you have going on. As we talked about before, when you’re smaller, it’s all about conversions. When you’re getting visitors, are they signing up for you email list and checking out other things on your website?

You have to convert, even if it’s a small number. When working with coaching clients, I’ve seen them start making decent (not earth-shattering) income when they get 100 email subscribers. Converting is key and something we should focus on. This will be the end of the written portion of this series, I’ll continue in the webinar tonight.

Live demo

So I told you at the beginning of this series that you would have a chance to see if what I’m talking about works. My friend Jimmy Burggess is launching his book four days in June (3-6). He’s forming a launch team and wants you on it. We will be using the strategies I’ve been teaching you about.

He’s offering you some killer behind-the-scenes stuff to be on the team, you’ll be able to see how we’re doing this and you’ll walk away with stuff you can use in your next launch. Check out all the freebies and learn how to launch when you have a small audience. .

I’ll also be doing those follow-up posts so stay tuned. You’re going to do this and rock it, be confident! What self-publishing questions do you have?