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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joanna Penn
Read between
June 17, 2018 - December 8, 2019
You can't make a living from your writing if you're not actually writing.
But so many writers get obsessed over their first book, spending years writing, editing and polishing it without moving on to the next one.
Focus on entertaining, educating or inspiring your readers and just write more.
It's also much easier to learn by doing rather than reading. Play around with the publishing
sites, with WordPress, with social media. Don't take it all so seriously!
Don't be afraid to experiment and take risks. Yes, you will get knocked down. You will fail. But you just have to get...
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Stop asking permission. You don’t need it. Stop waiting to be chosen. Choose yourself.
An author can’t build a business on luck – but they can learn about marketing, and authors have to do that these days, regardless of how they publish.
This is for books in English by the way – we’re so lucky that English is the most international language.
So if you want a traditional deal, you could skip the slush pile and serve your apprenticeship as an indie.
I’m lucky because I love being an entrepreneur.
Of course, if you only care about readers, then indie is a great option.
My personal choice is to use print on demand through Createspace and Ingram Spark, so my print books are available on all online bookstores and in catalogues that libraries and bookstores order from.
After all, a career isn't built on one book.
For fiction, it's more about resonating with your genre and giving an impression of your book, which is much more difficult!
good sales description and one way to get into the mood for writing one is to look at 10-15 top selling books in your genre.
Sells, or listen to this interview with Bryan Cohen on writing sales descriptions: www.TheCreativePenn.com/salesblurb It's much
Do it yourself using Vellum ebook formatting
software. This is what I use now as it creates gorgeous ebooks, but it is Mac only. You can find it at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/vellum
I use Amazon KDP for Kindle, Kobo Writing Life and iTunes Connect for iBooks.
Think about how people shop on the online book stores or on devices.
but a lot more on Apple if you publish direct.
For more on categories, check out this interview with Nick Stephenson: www.TheCreativePenn.com/nick.
Categories
One book with a great launch might have a spike of sales initially but over time the numbers will shrink, unless another book comes along to boost the signal.
not necessarily money, and we all need both!
and go check the data on AuthorEarnings.com which shows that 70% of the top 200,000 ebooks are genre fiction, which include romance, mystery/thriller, sci-fi and fantasy.
You need to immerse yourself in the genre in order to write it well. You can't fool hardcore readers!
Check the rankings of the top books per sub-genre to
What are the images used? What are the expectations of the audience for these types of books? What do the top-selling books have in common? How does your book measure up and what can you do to improve it?
(3) Write books that people want to buy: by search term
people find it even though I don't do any marketing for that book and it doesn't relate to my online platform.
The next ten years will be extremely exciting for global sales and personally, I expect this to be
under $15. People have been trained to only spend that amount on books, despite the incredible value that's inside.
Taking this even further, people value personal time and community more than any of these, so if you sell consulting services,
They write a lot of books in popular genres and they grow their own email lists. They offer something enticing for free on their sites and they communicate with readers.
They email when books are available and they can chart at the top of the bestseller lists through sales to their fans alongside paid advertising. For more detail on this, check out the webinar replay I did with Nick Stephenson:
The tips in this section are all you need if you only want to make money from books.
If you can write lots of books, that IS your content marketing strategy.
But if you're not writing a high volume of books and you want to expand into multiple streams of income, then you have to find some
Is there a way to subscribe to your email list? Is there a clear enticement to do so, using something of value that the customer actually wants? Is there a Shop or a Books link or a Store or a Buy button? What do you want the customer to do next?
(1) Start writing regularly for public consumption
(2) Decide what your focus will be and find examples of people to model
(3) Prepare something for sale - and then actually sell it
(4) Grow your audience
(5) Grow the number of products you’re selling
(6) Make a plan to switch your income over to writing full time
(7) Stop procrastinating and take action
I put words on the page every day and commit to this as my career, my hobby, my passion and my life.
