Breaking Orbit
How to Write, Publish and Launch Your First Bestseller on Amazon Without a Mailing List, Blog or Social Media Following
Jonathan Green
Dragon God Books
Copyright © 2016-2017 by Dragon God, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Simultaneously published in United States of America, the UK, India, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Japan, Spain, and Brazil.
All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form of by any other electronic or mechanical means – except in the case of brief quotations embodies in articles or reviews –without written permission from its author.
Breaking Orbit has provided the most accurate information possible. Many of the techniques used in this book are from personal experiences. The author shall not be held liable for any damages resulting from use of this book.
Contents
1. The Force of Gravity
FREE GIFT
2. A Simple Plan
3. Finding Your Niche
4. Tools of the Trade - Research
5. Keyword Research
6. Crafting A Title that Sells
7. Tools of the Trade - Outlining
8. Building the Framework of a Bestseller
9. Becoming an Author
10. Tools of the Trade - Writing
11. Write Like the Wind
12. Tools of the Trade - Editing
13. Editing
14. Judge a Book By Its Cover
15. Start on the Right Foot
16. The Ending is the Most Important Part
17. Tools of the Trade - Formatting
18. Formatting for Kindle
19. Formatting for CreateSpace
20. Turn Your Listing into a Sales Machine
21. The Secret to Golden Categories
22. Sell Books or Make Money
23. Become a Respected Amazon Author
24. How To Get Reviews Even If You Don’t Have Any Friends
25. Generating Hordes of Traffic with Kindle Select
26. Anatomy of a Launch
27. How to Make Ten Times More Money
28. Keep the Sales Rolling in for Years
29. Pull the Trigger
One Last Chance
More Information
Found a Typo?
About the Author
Books by Jonathan Green
One Last Thing
1
The Force of Gravity
“Sorry, your agent has decided he doesn’t want to meet with you after all.”
I flew from Nashville to New York and booked a hotel I could barely afford just to meet this literary agent, a friend of my father. They had done a lot of business in the past, and he was supposed to be my entry into the glorious world of the professional author.
I wasted time, money, energy and hope.
I was walking down the lonely streets of New York City, wondering why the agent stopped returning my calls the day before our meeting. And then I got this brush-off email from some assistant who I had never spoken to in the past.
I felt like the city that never sleeps kicked me right between the sticks.
Nobody around me knew what I was experiencing, but I felt like they did. I was humiliated. To have someone look at the totality of your existence and judge you lacking is brutal, cruel and mean. For a moment, I considered never writing another word.
Maybe I should go back to teaching or look for another job. But that wasn’t a realistic option. When you get fired from one of the top twenty universities in the country you can’t go back. I was over teaching. I didn’t want to slave away at the front of a classroom ever again. I wanted to move forward with my life.
I was such a terrible author that my agent didn’t even reject me personally. He dumped me like a cowardly teenager. The cold shoulder. The brush-off. He could have told me before I spent money I didn’t have on plane tickets and hotels and overpriced big city food. Part of me wanted to just lie down on the sidewalk and cry forever.
My next book grossed over five million dollars in sales. The very book that this agent rejected became one of my greatest successes. It still sells every single day all these years later.
This book is the story of how I turned rejection into thirty bestsellers and a life on one of the greatest tropical beaches in the world.
I took that kick in the pants so you don’t have to. You don’t have to deal with rejection letters from agents and publishers: the New York elite. You can write and publish Kindle books fast. You can replace your income, pay your bills and create an amazing life.
By the end of this book, you will have all the tools and knowledge that you need.
You Should Get in the Game
Most people don’t think they are great writers. They find it hard to imagine that they would ever write or publish words that other people want to read.
It’s amazing to think that twenty-four hours a day, someone in the world is reading words that I wrote. This magical feeling is how we can attain immortality. As long as people read your books, you can live forever.
I’m not a very talented writer. People occasionally feel the need to send me letters to remind me that I’m no Hemingway. During his life, he only published seven novels. He published some collections of short stories and non-fiction, but he’s not remembered for those. Only seven novels and he attained a level of immortality. If I wrote at the same pace, I would only have two books under my belt by now instead of more than one hundred.
The most financially successful author in the world is James Patterson. Make no mistake: he outsells everyone else. Every year another one of his books becomes a movie. He is the most prolific author going, constantly writing new novels and working with new partners. Quantity is a quality all on its own.
The secret to my success is speed. When you write and publish books fast, you can grow a real business. Writing books for glory and acclaim is not the path I teach. Becoming an Amazon author is about generating income. The only statistic to look at each month is your revenue. Whether you sell one book or ten thousand is irrelevant.
The Kindle program is fantastic because it puts you in total control of your destiny. You will make more money selling your book for $2.99 than you would selling it for $14.99 through a publisher. When you work with a publisher, you lose much of your voice. Sure, they help you with editing, but they also decide the cover and control the entire marketing strategy.
My last book, Serve No Master, was the story of my entire journey from fired university professor to living my dreams on a tropical island. The moment I took control of my destiny, everything changed.
Together we are about to go on an incredible journey. When you take control of your destiny, the world turns from a frightening nightmare into a wondrous opportunity. You no longer wonder if people will like your next book or if you will have enough money to make rent. Those worries will fade away.
The system in this book is about building a business. You are going to write and release books that people love to read and share with their friends. When your system is in place, you will develop passive income streams. My books are my children’s inheritance. If something horrible happened to me today, they would continue to receive royalty checks for years.
Most of us have no plan for retirement, and our kids will be lucky if they have en
ough inheritance to pay for the funeral. That is about to change. Building a Kindle empire creates revenue that grows while you sleep, while you travel, and even long after you're gone. This is the type of business that you can leave to your children and know they are protected.
Why You Should Listen to Me
I could load up this chapter with pictures of royalty checks or pictures of all my bestseller stars. Maybe I could fill it with pictures of me driving expensive cars or flying around in private jets. But that’s not what you’re here for.
You already bought this book, so I know you’re a believer. You want to achieve your dreams and grow something amazing.
I currently live on a beautiful tropical island. It’s considered to be one of the top surfing spots in the world. Sometimes it is fourth on the list, and sometimes it’s eighth. The ranking is always fluctuating on those lists, but for me it’s perfect. I have loads of pictures on my website of my little slice of paradise if you want to see them.
I live with my girlfriend just fifty meters from the water with nothing in the way except a pool and a little grass. We have two amazing children, and life is close to perfect. I haven’t worn a long-sleeve shirt in years, let alone a jacket. Every day here is warm; that’s the beauty of the tropics.
If I so desire, I can save this document and walk outside, catching world-class waves within ten minutes. My family and I live in our personal definition of paradise.
Writing pays for every single aspect of my life. My words pay for the food my children eat, the house they live in and the clothes they wear. I don’t have a separate day job. My writing employs more than six people full-time. I pump money into the local economy with the revenue from my words.
There are plenty of books out there about writing. Maybe you’ve read some of them. I don’t make a living teaching people how to be writers; I earn a living directly from my writing. Do you want to learn how to start a business from a teacher or someone running a real business?
What You Will Learn
This book is about more than just writing and publishing a book. It’s about more than my system that turns every book I write into a bestseller. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and you deserve so much more.
By the end of this little journey together, you will be able to write books that stay on the bestseller list for years. Your books will be the foundation of a business that supports your family. Most people see a book as an event, a moment in time.
A single book can make you a lot of money, but one day it can all disappear; people stop reading books all the time. Your new business will be shockproof. Rather than depend on the revenue from a single, lucky book to pay your bills, you will construct an entire business.
A business is something that can last; something that you can pass on to your children. Writing a book and launching it is just phase one. Building a connection with your readers that turns into more book sales, more product sales and a lasting relationship is the key.
You are going to learn how to:
Choose your first topic to write about
Find an audience desperate to read your book
Launch a book with reviews and traffic
Maintain momentum with your book for years
Turn your book into a following that you can reach every single day
Generate ten times more revenue from your books outside of Amazon
FREE GIFT
I have a special gift for you. You’ve finished reading the introduction, so you know a little bit about me. This book focuses on launching books in digital and paperback format. That’s just part of the game. Releasing audio books can increase your passive income by 30%.
Just click this link to get my entire audiobook training course. I will walk you through the entire process.
CLICK HERE TO BOOST YOUR INCOME BY 30%
ServeNoMaster.com/audio
2
A Simple Plan
Before we build our plan, we need to know our destination. People write books for many different reasons, and each of them requires a different strategy.
There are two main reasons people read this book: they have a story they want to tell, or they want to make money from books.
You may have a passion for telling your story. Many people who write fiction fall into this category. Perhaps you have helped people with your work for so long that you want to spread the message to a larger audience.
The story drives these types of books. You begin with the message, and then you seek out the audience. Ninety-nine percent of authors follow this approach. They write a book and throw it into the world without doing any research. Their sales will depend on hope and luck.
When the project or the topic itself drives you, the book becomes the end result. Your primary goal is to release that story into the world.
The second type of writer wants to build a business. This person sees writing as a step on the path to their goals. They want to create books that serve a purpose. They want to release books that make money.
People in the second camp start with market research. They look for the audience, find out what that audience wants, and then give it to them. They still write about topics that interest them, but they factor the audience into their decisions.
If you have a story you want to tell and don’t care whether the audience exists, then my ability to help you will be limited. Following the process in this book will get your book out into the world. You will get a lot of eyeballs on your book. Like warfare, however, the book business is a democracy and the readers get a vote.
Desiring to help people is very admirable, but if you create a book that appeals to a very small group of people you won’t sell very many units.
We will start our book creation journey with research. The better your research at the beginning of your process, the more profitable you will be at the end of your process.
If passion totally drives you, I can still help you. We will put together a great book and get a lot of people reading it. Just know in advance that you can’t create an audience out of nothing. You can write the greatest book in the world about customizing pagers, but if the audience isn’t there the book won’t sell.
(In case you’re younger than me, a pager or beeper was a small electronic device that existed before the cell phone. People could call your pager and leave their phone number and nothing else. You then had to find the nearest payphone to call them. Writing a book about pagers would fail because nobody uses them anymore.)
The start to your passion project should still be research. Find the closest audience to your message and design a book that will appeal to them.
I Love Geometry
Breaking Orbit is the second book under the Serve No Master brand. Many of my books in the past have been under pen names to fit their markets better. I have already blocked out and planned ten different topics that I will write about over the next year.
Whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction, you need a series of books to be profitable.
The average self-published book on Amazon sells for $2.99. With a seventy-percent commission, you make just around two bucks per sale.
If you create one book on your topic, each new customer is worth two dollars. After they buy your book, there is nothing else for them and they move on to the next author. Your entire business depends on continually finding new readers.
When you create a series or a collection of related books, something very magical happens. The majority of your readers will buy multiple books, and many will read through your entire series.
I love to read science-fiction. When I find a new author, I read through all of their books voraciously. Some authors have one book, and when I finish reading it I am hungry for more content, but there is nothing left for me. I have to find another new author.
I read some authors who have more than twenty books in their series. I read that entire series and follow these incredible, epic adventures. I will stay there through the entire journey
even if the books are only average. I will stick with less than stellar books because I am hooked on the ride. Having a longer series can make up for targeting a limited audience.
The first author makes two dollars when I discover their work, but the second one will make ten times more money. With a fiction series, you don’t have to invent new worlds and characters constantly; you can continue in the universe you have already built.
Americans are voracious for extended stories. So many television shows have more than two hundred episodes because we enjoy serial stories. We love developing a connection with our favorite characters.
I am primary a non-fiction author. When I create a book, I always think about creating a series of related books. Creating a one-off book on an isolated topic is a high-risk strategy. If I create ten books on similar topics, I only need ONE to be a hit. People will read that one and then read the rest of the books in that collection. I am no longer risking everything on a single book. I can control the odds of financial success.
The more books you add to your series the greater your income. The graph of this geometric growth is a parabola. Each month your income will grow, and the graph of your profits will look like a rocket ship blasting out to space. You will more than double your income every time you add new books to your series.
Breaking Orbit: How to Write, Publish and Launch Your First Bestseller on Amazon Without a Mailing List, Blog or Social Media Following (Serve No Master Book 4) Page 1
