Paperback Publishing

Sell More Books – 7 Incredible Insights for Authors

April 16, 2020 by Arun Leave a Comment

Nothing is more pathetic than working hard on your book and publishing it only to find out that no one is interested in it.

In this article, we will see 7 important mindset shifts to help you sell more books and earn better from your writing. Although these are best principles for Authors who write their own books, some concepts can also help if you are re-publishing a public domain book.

Contents

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Research Before You Write

If you want to sell books, then we need to understand from the very beginning that sales is directly proportional to the number of people who will be interested in whatever you want to write.

Studying the market even before you write, and doing some research on keywords, surveying what people in your field really want – will all go a long way when you finish writing and start selling. In fact, these could pave the way to sell your books even before you start writing. KDP also has ‘pre-order’ sales options available to its authors.

This way, we can distinctly divide the entire process into three parts:

Research
Write
Promote

All these three steps are important and go hand-in-hand to ensure you sell more books.

Tools such as Publisher Rocket help in finding approximately how many people have bought similar titles in your genre, what is the typical download count per a period, and more such useful metrics for you to decide.

Another treasure trove is the book reviews, ratings, and comments section for similar titles that others have written. – You can easily find what your potential audience have loved and hated from their comments and then use that intel to enhance your writing exponentially.

If you are interested in learning more tactics, I highly recommend reading Pat Flynn’s ‘Will it fly‘ book – I will provide the link below so you can give it a shot.

Download a mind map version of this article.

Importance of platform awareness

Having different versions of the books you’ve written is great, but if you are just starting out, focus only on your Kindle version.

More books are sold on Kindle than in print!

This way you can first focus on establishing a place for yourself in the world of writing. After you see some traction in your ebook sales, you can move on to publishing them in print editions.

Not just that, there are more avenues in the eBook world and Kindle is not the end – we have leanpub, Kobo, Google Play Books, Smashwords, iBooks and so on so you can cater to different types of people.

They are all people reading ebooks but the devices they carry in their hands are different and you are losing out on lot of money if you don’t tap into that diversity.

That’s why it’s all the more important to be platform aware and start focusing on the eBook market in your first month of selling eBooks before you exhaust all the options and then step into the print versions.

Understanding the technical side of ebooks

A simple shift in the mindset regarding the technologies we use to self-publish takes you really far in making the work you do to stand out from your competition.

An eBook is really just a web page, written in HTML. Learning some basics of HTML and CSS can really help in formatting the ebooks the way you want. If not nothing, consider using the services offered by professionals who charge very less in platforms like upwork or fiverr. They are experts in using HTML, CSS who can format your ebook the way you want with all the designs and formatting specifics.

Expect Less

Your first published book is no-doubt a bestseller in your family circles, but it will not be a super-hit out in the world from day one onward.

There are exceptions and I will consider myself lucky if it happens to me. If you are just beginning to write and sell books as an author, then try writing something short but valuable for your target audience and learn all the technicalities involved in self-publishing your first book.

Publish more often applying the knowledge you’ve gained from the first book. Unlike olden days where people used typewriters to type their manuscript, and publishers who used big printing press machines, writing books need not take years with hand-held gadgets, cloud based apps, and self-publishing resources available for free these days.

Learn this business, forget the expectations, gain the experience and eventually you will ride on easily with increased revenue because this is all just science and the process works the same way for everyone.

Connecting with readers

Some authors just share their ideas in their books and leave it at that. The book stands in isolation without any action items for the readers, so they just move on after reading and you have lost a potential fan because there is no way to connect with you for them.

As an author, connecting to your readers is an important opportunity to ensure they also read your next book. CTAs or Call to action inside your books are vital to building a following for your works.

Turning that into a loyal following group depends on your consistency in engaging the audience with what they ask for. Here are some ideas that could bring your readers to know you better and get closer to you.

Introduction page – where you can tell more about yourself,
Contact page – Creating and linking to your website and other social media channels.
Offering a supplement to your current book and letting them sign up for your Newsletters or other free accompanying downloads called as Lead Magnets.
Creating a Facebook community and making it exclusive access to your followers.
Doing an AMA or “Ask Me Anything” chat sessions on Twitter, Reddit, or Gitter (https://gitter.im)

Delivery Costs

Size of the eBook increases delivery costs from Amazon, thus leading to lesser royalties.

This is something that all the authors who are self-publishing using Amazon to be aware of.

I created a dedicated video to address this issue and how you can resolve it. The primary culprit is the images you use in the eBook and in this other video, you’ll learn how to compress them effectively without losing the quality. Links are provided in the description below.

Content Seeding

The core principle here is repurposing the content you’ve already written. Almost every book you write can take another birth of its own as a podcast, blog article, video, a slideshow, a course, a checklist (for non-fiction works), an infographic, or any other mini PDF that can be created out of the original work you wrote first.

No book should be left in isolation and must be reborn in one or many of these forms.

Bonus Tip to Sell More Books:

For all those of you who are still reading, I have a bonus tip. Well, it’s actually a no-brainer but not EVERYONE realizes it. So, I thought I will share it, anyway.

Hyperlinked Table of contents:

In case your books don’t have this, it’s time you edit and re upload your eBooks after creating a table of contents – and if you already have the TOC on your eBooks, then pat yourself on your back. This is because TOC section provides a great reader’s experience on eBooks. Some don’t use it and some misuse it by placing it at the end of their eBooks – this not only is a poor reading experience but also makes Amazon think that you are cheating its algorithm by letting the system think that the reader has fully read your book by reaching the end of the eBook. This is usually manipulated to tap into the KENP page read count related royalties. So, use the TOC within the starting sections only and use it to link to your main chapter and sub-chapter headings. Again, I have another video which talks about creating Table of Contents.

So, those were some pointers to keep in mind on your writing journey. I hope this was useful and let me know if you have any problems or questions on Amazon KDP below.

Cheers and good luck!

Arun

How to Start a Page Number from a Specific Page in Word

November 27, 2018 by Arun Leave a Comment

In today’s blog post, we will see how to start a page number from a specific page, like the Chapter 1 or any Front Matter section like the Foreword section.

Thus, by simply following the steps given in this article, you can make Page numbers for your paperback books look professional.

Pagination for PaperBacks

The secret to adding page numbers starting at first page for your first chapter is in using ‘Section breaks’. You might have used page breaks to separate different portions of your front pages and all the different chapters.

However, if you want to see different stylings for your page numbers, then go for Section breaks instead of Page breaks.

To organize what we learn, I have divided this instruction into three different categories:

Creating sections
Adding & formatting page numbers
Deleting page numbers

Watch this on YouTube

If you don’t have time to read this blog post, simply watch this on YouTube here:

Creating sections

First and foremost, for the page numbers to be customized the way you want it to be, you need to create ‘Section breaks’ between different sections of your book – like the pages within the usual Front matter (copyrights, foreword, introduction, dedications), Chapters 1, 2, 3, and so on.

Page breaks won’t be helpful when it comes to creating page numbers in our footers. To create a ‘Section break’, just go to the Layout tab, click on Breaks and choose ‘Next Page‘ under the Section Breaks.

Create a ‘section break’ in between all your different sections and move to the next step.

Adding & formatting page numbers

First double-click on your footer section of the page where you want to add the page number.

Once you double-click, the Header & Footer tools tab gets activated with its Design tab shown.

Now, click on ‘Page Number‘ and select ‘Bottom of Page‘ (you can choose whichever position you prefer here) and add page number.

Formatting page numbers

Then, click again on the ‘Page Number‘ and select ‘Format Page Numbers…‘ and choose a Number format from the first drop-down option given. If you’d wanted to select ‘Roman Numerals‘ for your Front Matter section, this is the time to choose them !!

Additionally, if you want to customize the ‘starting’ page number for your chapter, you can change the number to start at a different number from the ‘Start at:‘ counter.

Deleting page numbers from the first page of a new chapter

Professional editors choose not to show page numbers on the first page of a new chapter. You can also do that by simply selecting this checkbox which says ‘Different First Page‘.

This is how you add a different starting page number for your first chapter.

Here’s a question for you: what’s the real challenge in self-publishing your first book, in case you haven’t created any yet?

Let me know in the comments below and I will see if I can help you in any way through a video or a blog post or just directly answering your questions.

How to Order Proof and Author Copies of Kindle Paperback Book

January 18, 2018 by Arun Leave a Comment

This is a great news for authors!

Amazon KDP has recently announced (Jan 13, 2018) that it provides low-cost copies of books for its authors.

Ordering author <span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>copies

You can watch more details on the video above.

So, if you have written or writing a book that is going to be published as a paperback, you now have two options:

Order (upto a maximum of 5 copies) proof copies of your paperback book or
Order (999 copies per order) Author copies of your paperback book.

Both these are priced at the basic costs – shipping, taxes, and printing cost. The margin that you place for marketplaces will not be included in ordering these books.

KDP Royalties – Earn Through Direct Deposit Worldwide

November 22, 2017 by Arun 8 Comments

If you are a Kindle publisher, you might be facing a problem in not being able to receive direct deposit worldwide, while “check” is the only alternative to receive royalties from international sales of your eBooks.

We will sort that issue for you in this blog post!

Amazon provides 13 marketplaces worldwide, as you know, that comprises of US, India, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, AND Australia.

However, we certainly don’t have bank accounts in all the 13 countries across several continents, unless you excessively travel across the globe and have a place to stay everywhere!

So, now comes the genuine problem of how do we get paid Kindle eBook Royalties from all the countries where Amazon operates?

Amazon currently offers 3 options:

Direct deposit, also known as EFT or electronic funds transfer,
Wire transfer, and
Check/cheque – all options are based on the location of your bank.

Minimum Threshold Factor:

The benefit of direct deposit into your bank is that there is no minimum threshold. For check and wire payments, there is a “minimum threshold” in each marketplace after deducting the applicable taxes. That’s why, you can go ahead and update your bank account details – be it State bank, Axis bank, ICICI bank, or any local bank you have an account in your country.

Please note that although Amazon calls it “Wire transfers” sometimes they refer to “ACH transfers” and there is a difference between the two. Let’s now compare and contrast between these 2 options – ACH and Wire transfers to understand it better.

Difference between ACH and Wire Transfer

Wire transfers move funds from one bank to another in one business day, and the funds can even be made available within that day; sometimes when you receive a wire transfer, you won’t see the funds immediately. If you receive a genuine wire transfer, you can be confident that the funds were sent, as they cannot be reversed. Wire transfers almost always come with a fee tag.

Whereas, ACH transfers often take two to three business days to complete. Banks process ACH payments in batches – they’re all done together instead of being handled individually. On the other hand, ACH transfers are quite safe too, except that they can be reversed in situations of fraud or a mistake of overpayment. However, ACH transfers are almost always free, especially if you’re receiving funds into your own account.

So which option is best?

As you would have observed by now, “Direct deposit” is the best way to receive royalties from Amazon. It’s also the fastest, most secure and environmentally friendly way to receive your royalty payments.

Wire transfers or ACH transfers are the second best options, but only if Amazon has allowed this mode of payment. The 3rd one – check payment is the last option which even Amazon feels it an overhead – a note of caution here that Amazon is planning to phase it out, that is…discontinue it by the end of 2017 for some marketplaces.

How to enable Direct Deposit for all the 13 Marketplaces where Amazon operates?

Let’s now see how to update bank accounts for all the marketplaces so you can get an EFT from worldwide sales. To do this, we will use a Payoneer account (opens in a new tab) which helps in establishing a virtual bank account that acts as a local bank account but can help receive funds in international currencies.

Signing up is a simple 4 step process where you will give your details to create your account with Payoneer. Once done, and to receive funds into the Payoneer account from Amazon, we need to update our PAN number (Permanent Account Number – applicable for indie publishers in India) as well.

Here is our new Payoneer account welcome page.

Now, this is the secret sauce of this entire setup. Please read and follow these settings carefully.

Click on the ‘Global Payment Service‘ icon as given in the screenshot below.

Click on EUR and get all the bank details here that are created just for you.

Enter these bank details into your KDP account page and you will be just fine, so hereafter you need not wait until a payment threshold is met because, with EFT, there is no minimum threshold.

After the above update is done, whenever there are royalty earnings in Euro, Great Britain Pound, or other currencies that you choose to update through Payoneer, they will get directly deposited into your Payoneer account.

You can, later on, move your earnings from Payoneer to your local bank account. In case of Indian customers, this process is automated and the funds are usually transferred to the bank account within a couple of days after receipt of international royalties.

Watch this blog post in video format here:

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the comments section below.