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7 Things I Did to Sell More Books

Winson
7 Things I Did to Sell More Books. thinkmaverick

I told her I didn’t care about the money.

 

All I wanted to do was to focus on not getting stuck in a cubicle.

 

I did what I was told all my life.

 

Study hard, memorize the facts, ace the exams, go to college and graduate.

 

All for the sake of getting ‘pre-selected’ for a cubicle.

 

Parents normally expected a return on their $100k college ‘investment’.

 

But I was so upset, I didn’t want to work for anyone else but me.

 

So I went for broke.

 

24 years of formal education went down the drain.

 

I allowed the fear of failure and expectations pass over me and through me.

 

Each day, the volume just keeps getting turned up louder.

 

‘You’re going to have to get a job someday!’ he said. Panic.

 

If I had allowed this fear to seep into my brains, it would have directly impacted the quality of my decision back then.

 

In many cases, this cacophony of fear serves as a silent assassin to making good choices.

 

In a world filled with so much noise, the only sound worth listening to is your own.

 

I’m sort of proud that I made it out alive. Paid back my college tuition degree in full and more at 10 times the speed than if I continued down the regular path.

 

I calculated and realize that I had saved myself from working 9 to 5 for 10 straight years.

 

The moment I broke out of the mold, I joined a world of people trying to live a creative life, an outrageous life, a courageous life, a life with impact and meaning.

 

Not necessarily a successful life according to ‘mainstream’ standards.

 

When you stick out like a nail, you will get hammered by society.

 

There are no guarantees of lifetime employment here.

 

A business is just a conduit for money.

 

Its success shouldn’t be your priority.

 

What’s important is that you’re doing what you want, and that you’re gaining specific skill-sets.

 

If one day my business ceases to appeal to me, I’d just quit.

 

You should do the same.

 

Everyone is trying to start the next Amazon, Facebook or Google.

 

But almost no one understands what it takes to stand out and make a difference.

 

Once the standard is set, there’s no point in trying to replicate what was done.

 

Think of today’s world as one big Monopoly game except you and I came into this game long after certain players gained control of the board so we will never win.

 

We’d all fail by those standards.

 

Big corporations out there do not only have the capital but they have zero principles.

 

Try competing with them by dropping your principles? Amazon or Facebook can drop principles faster than you can sneeze. And they’ll put a billion dollars behind their zero-principled approach in order to dominate the market, so you will lose your business.

 

There are always competitors, politicians, bankers and companies that are willing to shed principles faster than you.

 

If you try to compete with them on the same board game, ultimately you would lose by a landslide.

 

Its a fiat money printing game coupled with crony fucking capitalism.

 

Don’t play by their rules. Play by your own.

 

Recognize that the principles themselves are a very important competitive differentiation.

 

If you keep by your principles, you’d gain a huge competitive differentiator that many companies out there cannot compete with.

 

You’d be arming yourself with the specific knowledge, accountability and leverage that only you hold the key.

 

This is something that you cannot be trained for. Or else society can simply replace you.

 

This set of principles can only be found simply because you pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

 

We are all socialized from birth with a million spoken and unspoken rules of society. Our family, our friends, our schools and our religious affiliations silently but efficiently fill us with notions and beliefs that we almost never question.

 

If you have been believing in things without question, it’s going to keep leading you to sub-optimal choices and results.

 

In other words, you have to value something more than just money.

 

Take massive ACTION on the things you believe in.

 

When you take this path, it will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

 

This is often a highly creative or technical process.

 

If you can change your FOCUS, you can change your future.

 

Money is just the unintended side effect of providing society with value.

 

But value is not enough. Solve problems.

 

Solve big ones and you make a lot of money.

 

Solve small ones and you may make some money.

 

Ultimately, you can get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know why or how.

 

Be patient, most times you’re just 3-feet from gold. You will not know when.

 

At the end, you need to learn how to play the long term game and stay at problems longer than everyone else.

 

This takes low time preference and Guts. A lot of it.

 

I’m not trying to sell a book marketing course. Just listing my thoughts. Particularly #3

7 Things I Did to Sell More Books

#1) Do the Math

I am not a math whiz.

But before I switched into full-blown publishing mode, I needed to know the odds of me succeeding.

I did a rough calculation on the number of books I had to publish in order to get at least 1,000 downloads per month.

In 2013, I would wake in the middle of the night. Too anxious to sleep.

I obsessively went over and over and over my strategy to make this work.

Every time I had a “solution” to it, my anxious brain would discover more problems.

You can’t THINK your way to success, but you can DO your way to success.

I got a notebook and I calculated my return on investment.

I wrote down the time, emotion and effort I would put into this, and then listed three simple tricks for each input so I can gauge the profitability.

Humans are terrible at dealing with probability. We’re hardwired to be incompetent.

Using these words to convey likelihood – ‘probably’ and ‘usually’ implies a 50% to 100% chance.

That’s why ventures fail halfway down the road after all that time, money and emotion spent.

They did not measure, hence they failed to establish the costly irrational fears and inclinations.

This blind-spot in our consciousness can simply be dealt with by going beyond our crude understanding of probability.

Do the math.

You must understand the essential cost, gain, timeframe and other variables involved to give you a more accurate measure.

If you know these, you’ll beat every casual author, publisher or marketer 100% of the time.

 

#2) Build a Sustainable Life Model

It took me a while to figure out how to build a successful model for myself.

To be completely free to choose who i want to be with and what I genuinely wanted to learn.

The education that I can give away freely to everybody today is a result of this model.

In the beginning, I had to persuade my family of ‘investors’ to follow along with my crazy idea, it’s never easy. Even now.

Of course, I have my own definition of success. I’m not a billionaire. I don’t care about that status.

Billionaires don’t get to where they are today playing nice. They gain it by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

Money always flows from people that never have enough to those that have more money than they know what to do with.

It is the game of Monopoly, in the end, there is only one winner with all the money.

The one who owns the money printing machine.

Ignore all who play status games. FOCUS on your work of art.

You become what you focus on.

 

Write your own story.

Build your own legacy.

That’s more important than chasing the limelight.

 

For years and years, I chased their cheers.

But there’s a craving of always needing more.

Don’t let your eyes be blinded by the lights.

 

#3) Kill the Inner Demon of Perfection

So in 2013 I started writing every single day and haven’t stopped since.

I thought I had to write a great bestselling novel like J.K. Rowling to succeed.

So I read hundreds of books, blogs and articles. I started writing every day. I ignored calls to go out to socialize.

I took freelance jobs that had flexible hours so I could spend most of the day writing.

I wrote dozens of short stories and articles. I even put up a small little book of my story and gave them for free.

No one wanted it. I got rejected.

Hundreds and hundreds of rejections. More books, stories and articles were in draft. Nothing got published.

I was afraid of hitting that publish button. Afraid to fail.

I expected perfection at first. Don’t.

When you first become an artist, you’re like a rock.

You’re in a raw, natural state with hidden gems inside.

Dig down deep and find the emeralds tucked away inside.

And that’s just the beginning. Once you found the gems, you have to polish them.

It takes a lot of hard work.

Oh, and here’s the tricky part, sometimes you can spend years polishing a rough rounding stone but it’ll still be worthless.

But there might be something much more valuable inside that you can’t yet see.

The smaller crystals are much more valuable and there may be even some deeper inside that we can’t see that’re even more precious.

 

There’s no need to rush.

Take your time to polish your talent.

 

I should’ve started by doing EXACTLY that. I wish I had known this then.

7 years later I’m still a student of this trade.

 

#4) Ramp up Rate of Experimentation

I was afraid of being ridiculed.

I had such thin skin.

Slowly I taught myself to fail.

Also pride and ego didn’t matter much to me after my acid test.

I started ramping up my rate of experimentation.

It’s actually relatively easy to publish new things that people don’t care about.

But successful books, if you want to publish a lot of that, you basically have to increase your rate of experimentation.

 

Think of it as a process – how do you go about organizing your time, your effort, all of your assets and your own daily life, how do you go about those things to ramp up your rate of experimentation?

 

Understand that not all of your books are going to sell.

If you FOCUS on the numbers, this will drive the BEST outcome in the long run.

Thomas Edison tried over 2,000 ways to create the light-bulb.

He spent thousands of hours exploring dead ends.

Some of those experiments took weeks of work before they could pan out as possibilities.

Others showed signs of early success but eventually proven to be non-viable options.

He loved to fail.

To him, failure is just as valuable as success.

Success comes with experimentation over time.

 

#5) Create a Community

A writer must first do a dance to prove himself worthy in front of an audience.

Platforms like YouTube, Podcasts, Blogs, Twitter, Quora all give you access to millions of people at a push of a button.

 

Having this community in place is like rocket fuel for your books.

I found it way easier to sell when there’s a strong community around the topic of my book.

So I value this more than any marketing expert in the world.

Always write to build relationships with like-minded people.

This can be a long arduous process. But stick to it and it’ll pay off in the end.

Blogging is my tried and true strategy of selling more books.

 

One question I get asked all the time is why should I blog?

Why wouldn’t I just want to have a sales-page on Amazon?

 

I always answer this question with another question.

Would you put your future in the hands of someone else who doesn’t share your personal interests?

Amazon doesn’t allow you to message your followers, they don’t want you to even have your readers’ email, and they can mess with you whenever they feel like it.

In fact, Amazon changed their payout to authors without warning on a number of occasions.

Historically, it has driven small-time authors to quit publishing altogether.

Don’t take somebody else’s land for granted.

This is Your Business! Grow and cultivate your own digital plot of land with a blog.

You never want to be tied down or forced to go out of business one day should they choose to shut you down.

The idea is to capture your readers email addresses and to build up a list of emails.

This will be your community.

And each time you launch a book, blast an email to thousands’ with a click of a button.

 

Most people fail to understand the compounding power of blogging.

Although you may think that your favorite social media sites like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram is good enough to start promoting your books.

The truth is, you are missing out on these stats:

 

Here’s the thing.

Most people throw up a book and pray that the readers will come. But the truth is that getting organic traffic to a brand new book can be quite challenging early on.

And that is why over 90% of authors make less than $10,000 a year, and I made over $250,000 in six months.

The easiest way to sell your books is to first build an audience of loyal fans first. And the best way to establish this audience is with a blog.

Not only can a blog position you as an authority within your niche but it will also attract free search engine traffic as well. And once you’ve established a following, the sales will start rolling in.

 

For example,

  1. Internet users in the US spend 3x more time on blogs than they do on email. Source: HubSpot
  2. 60% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. Source: HubSpot
  3. 346 million people read blogs throughout the world. Adding a blog to your website attracts many of these readers. Source: The Future Buzz

Because I have established a decent sized audience through my various niche blogs, I’m able to sell my books more effectively and efficiently while pushing the rankings higher and higher on Amazon.

In addition,the average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.

 

Blogging is an excellent way to …

Over the years, 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging.

Whether you are looking to establish yourself as an authority or if you want to attract potential customers for your books, a blog is a must have!

If you want, you can try blogging for just $2.49/month.

 

#6) Generate Valuable Book Ideas

Pick a niche that you’re fond of.

This can be about gardening, road-trips, golf, fishing, games, etc.

Write 10 new things about that each day.

Each item should include Power Words.

As in, “I wish someone had told me the Painful Truth about gardening 10 years ago.”

“I did not know that games can be Empowering in that manner”  for each item on your list.

The general idea is to crank up emotion with Fear, Encouragement, Lust, Anger, Greed, Safety or Forbidden words.

When you have idea 100 on your list, you have your first draft of a book.

Here are some more ways to improve your ability to generate valuable ideas.

You can also leverage on sites like Quora to find the most burning questions that people have about a topic.

It is a gateway for answer seekers and a whole variety of ‘experts‘ in their field.

You can be that expert.

Why generate ideas like this?

Well, because you’ll forget. Your mind doesn’t work like a computer hard drive.

It decays every time a new theory is formed.

Write that ‘aha‘ moment or burning question you have immediately!

 

#7) Hold Myself Accountable and Leverage

“Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.”  – Archimedes

In the beginning…

I told myself I had to write and publish 10 books in a month.

That was the only way I could hit my mathematical target within the time-frame I had. By any means necessary.

Whatever I tried seem to fail. The first deadline, the second, the third. I started well but ended up gradually behind schedule.

Then I discovered the secret of accountability.

The only way it could work is that I started putting myself at risk of humiliation.

You could lose respect by not keeping to your word.

That is a very powerful interpersonal leverage.

Broadcast in public. Make a declaration on air. Tell your business partner.

Society will end up rewarding you with the responsibility you take for yourself.

The most accountable people put their name on the line. Elon Musk, Richard Branson even Trump.

I also began leveraging sites like Upwork, Fiverr, deviantART, Twitter to seek talent and experts in their space.

Ask for collaboration, make use of their talent, ideas, art, creativity, etc.

And just get that book published within that stipulated time.

Don’t pile up all that pressure on yourself.

Outsource a book cover to Fiverr or 99Designs.

Find someone to format your book for Kindle.

Get someone to transcribe your audio and convert into different formats.

Boom! You have a published book.

After some months, you’ll have TEST, TEST, TEST.

With a list of books you now have in your catalog, pick the book that has the most engagement.

Create a sequel to that book or a series. Books platforms allow you to create book series that keep your readers fed with your content.

 

P.S. If this post inspired you to publish your own book…

I created a course just for you. It’s called The Maverick Guide to Self Publishing…

And in it, I walk you through everything from coming up with a book idea… all the way to marketing a bestseller!

Click here to start your self-publishing journey today!

Of course its FREE!

 

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