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)

by Jonathan Green

  Many ghostwriters can put together decent content, but their final phrasing is imperfect. They send you a book that is good, but not great. Running the book through Hemingway will help you turn their words into pure gold.

  Get as many people to read your book as possible if you are editing yourself. Give away loads of free copies and ask people to email you if they catch a mistake that slipped through the cracks. You can do your best and then use your profits from the first book sales to hire an editor for the second edition.

  Hiring an Editor

  Finding a good editor is tough. You can run Internet searches and read through author forums; you still might have no idea on pricing and competency.

  When you contact an editor, they send you a complicated structure asking if you want editing, line-editing, or developmental editing. Their entire pricing structure is based on how much they will change your book.

  Line editing focuses on communication and will point out mistakes in language, redundancies, and other bigger picture mistakes. Copy editing is focused purely on spelling and grammar errors. This process is far more technical. There are also proofreaders and many other types of editors to deal with.

  It’s a daunting process and can end up costing thousands of dollars. How do you know which type of editing you need unless they have looked at your book? Most freelance editors start out at $.002 a word and go up from there in pricing. Line editing starts out close to $.01. For a book that is one hundred thousand words, line editing will cost at least a thousand bucks. That’s a lot of cheddar for a book that’s going to sell for $2.99.

  When you make two bucks a sale, the first five hundred sales belong to your editor. It’s a real kick in the teeth. Bad reviews if you don’t do it, and no profits if you do. Trying to follow the traditional “publisher” advice leaves you paying out of pocket for multiple editors and proofreaders. You can easily spend ten thousand dollars before anyone sees your book.

  Edit the book to the best of your ability using friends, family, and software. After that, there are some reasonably priced editors out there. If you have a short, ten-thousand-word book, you can find a decent editor for under two hundred bucks who can handle the job in a week.

  Whatever you do, expect this process to take a bit of time. Writing is about creativity, but editing is about perfection. There are a few reasonably priced editors that I know, and I will post links to them at ServeNoMaster.com/orbit.

  14

  Judge a Book By Its Cover

  Before readers ever see your book description, the inside pages or any reviews, they see your book cover on Amazon. A bad grammar review from a reader can kill your book, but a bad cover can ensure that you never sell a single copy.

  I can look at a cover and immediately tell who made the cover. Bad covers are obvious and have glaring, unprofessional mistakes.

  You must understand how customers purchase books on Amazon before you release your book. Many authors throw a book on Amazon, but they have never purchased one before. I meet a lot of struggling writers who don’t own a Kindle.

  Failure to understand your audience and how they make buying decisions will destroy your sales process. You can write the greatest book in the world, but if the cover is bad nobody will ever read it. More than ninety percent of buying decisions are controlled by the book cover.

  I am doing my best to explain just how important this is here because I know exactly what will happen if you ignore me. I was on a coaching call today with a writer complaining about his book’s lack of sales. The book cover was horrendous. The book had a mix of clashing neon colors that almost made my eyes tear up. The author’s name was not on the cover. There was a pile of clipart that had nothing to do with the topic smashed on top.

  If you ignore this chapter, your book will not sell. Do not email me complaining that my process doesn’t work if you skip this step. You have to follow each step in this process to achieve success. Anything less and you will be disappointed.

  I will say this one final time.

  Nobody buys books with bad covers.

  Purpose

  Your cover can only serve one purpose. You cannot make a cover with two goals in mind, or your will fail at both of them. If you ask one hundred random independent authors about the purpose of their cover, most of them would give answers like,

  • To be pretty

  • To be interesting

  • To show readers the story

  • To show my name

  • To draw attention

  • To be exciting

  All of those answers are fine... unless you want to sell books and make money. The cover of your book serves a purpose: to get potential readers to click on your Amazon listing.

  You can’t make your cover decision in isolation. Pretending that other books don’t exist ensures that your book won’t see the light of day. When your book appears on Amazon, it will be surrounded by other similar books. Potential customers will scroll past ten or twenty relevant books. We want your cover to be the one each potential reader decides to click on.

  Even if your book is number one in your category, they will still see ten or twenty other books on the page that are all competing for that same customer. If they don’t click on your book and go to your listing, there is a zero percent chance they will read your book.

  They can only click on one book at a time, and you want to make sure your book gets that initial click. Your description and the elements of your actual listing page will turn that click into a sale.

  Your cover will never sell the book by itself. People see attractive covers all the time for books that they don’t buy.

  If your book cover is too different from the competition, people will ignore it. If this were a romance novel, I would have a picture of a muscleman showing off his abs. That would make sense in that category, but there is no chance you would have bought this book if the cover was a nice set of abs. The abs would be fascinating and certainly have caught your attention. If my only goal was to get your attention, then I accomplished my mission.

  But that’s not my goal, and that’s not your goal. Your cover is there to compete with other books and get you that click.

  We want to be laser-focused and keep our exact goal in mind as we make each decision in assembling the marketing for the book.

  Color

  Choosing the colors for your book is an art form. I have colors that I enjoy the most, but they never make it onto my covers. My book is not an altar to my hubris. The book is designed to entice, entertain and inform the reader. The cover of this very book was designed to please you, not me.

  There are a couple of critical decisions when choosing your color scheme. Start by looking at other books in your category or niche. Are all of the covers brightly colored, or do they use pastels? Do you see neon colors? Is the main background color black or white? For some spaces, all of the books use yellow as the dominant color.

  You can go deep into color research. There are massive corporations that create and test color schemes to sell to other companies. Lots of research goes into the color of every single logo you see driving down the street. Colors and schemes are never chosen at random.

  This book is in black and white, so including a bunch of demo color swatches here wouldn’t be very informative. I have an entire lesson on my site showing how color works and why some colors clash and some drive the sale. Each color has an attached emotional feeling, and you don’t want a color scheme that conflicts with the message of your book.

  When choosing a design, I usually start with a single color that I want and allow my designer to create the rest of the design with complementary colors. It’s easier to let a professional handle the color combinations. Limit your cover to four colors total, including black and white. Too many colors transitions from informative to appearing busy or distracting.

  Black and White

  More than half of all book purchases made on Amazon are through a Kindle device.

  When
you don’t own a Kindle, you have no idea what the customer experience is and can make some big mistakes. Most people will see your cover initially at around one and a half by two inches in size. Your book cover will be slightly larger than a postage stamp.

  On the Amazon website, the book will appear slightly larger, but not by much.

  We get excited about our ideas and put together covers that look awesome full-size. That’s great! But many covers that look awesome when big look like garbage when small.

  When people encounter your book on Kindle, the image will be tiny, and it will be in black and white. Ninety-nine percent of authors never test what their cover looks like in black and white. If you have a cover that is all beautiful blues and greens, on a Kindle it will appear muddy. Your cover will look like a black square, and nobody will take you seriously.

  You absolutely must test your cover ideas in black and white before building your final cover concept. The key is to have colors with high contrast; you want colors that are very bright and very dark. If you go back and look at my cover on your Kindle, you’ll notice that it looks BETTER in black and white.

  During the design phase, I made several changes that decreased how nice the cover looks large and in color. This cover is designed to look better small and in monochrome. The white smoke below the rocket ship pops right out of the page in black and white. Orange becomes the secondary color and white controls the screen.

  With an orange title and a white sub-headline, people might not even be able to read my title on a small Kindle screen.

  During the design phase of this book, I sent my concept out to three different artists. Each of them sent me a different design. I tested them all in black and white to choose my favorite.

  If your cover doesn’t work in black and white, you can slash your potential sales in half. If you already have a book that’s struggling on Amazon, you should check your cover right now; it's the first thing I check with my coaching students.

  Congruency

  Earlier I mentioned the idea of putting a very muscular man with fantastic abs on the cover. The cover would be interesting, but nobody would click on the book, let alone buy it. The problem is one of congruency.

  The art and images on your book must match the title and genre of your book. If you look at most books on Amazon after searching for “write a book,” you’ll notice there is no consistency. There are images of a giant eye, people sitting at typewriters, hot air balloons, a lot of pencils, and loads of books with the pages flapping in the wind. Most of these images have something to do with writing. The images make sense in the context of the topic.

  The hot air balloon is floating out of a picture of a book, and the title is about writing children’s books. In the correct context, even the hot air balloon makes sense.

  If you scroll through your search results, you’ll find some books that have a picture of the author on the cover. This is interesting because it’s different, but none of these books have high sales numbers. The image has nothing to do with the topic.

  There are certain books where we expect to see the author on the cover, such as diet and fitness books. Just because an idea works in one category does not mean it will work in another.

  Authors are not traditional celebrities. I bet you can describe the features of less than ten successful authors. I don’t think I can do more than ten. Authors are famous for their words, not their features.

  A break in congruency can lose you the sale. Any time the picture on your book doesn’t make sense to a reader, they might move on. People don’t like to be confused.

  You can ask for some feedback on your cover, and when somebody says they can’t quite put their finger on it but something doesn’t work for them, you have a congruency issue.

  I went through a load of image ideas while I was creating the title for this book. During my brainstorming session, I bandied around potential titles and images with one of my interns. After testing out a few concepts, one of the images that I initially liked was an astronaut in outer space. The image had a high contrast ratio, and I knew it would pop in color and in black and white.

  When he told me that he wasn’t feeling that astronaut image but wasn’t sure why, I knew it was a congruency issue. The main phrase we use is “launch a book.” That is the seed phrase for the concept of writing and publishing a successful book. The word “launch” conveys the idea of a moment and the idea of success. We launch winners.

  I took the idea of a spaceship from the word launch. We launch spaceships all the time. From there the idea grew into different space images. I looked at astronauts on foreign planets, but I knew immediately it was too far. I want to be related to the word “launch,” but an astronaut on another planet is just way too strange.

  I don’t want to spend too much time talking about my covers; you can see the images that I considered for this book cover and why each of them failed at ServeNoMaster.com/orbit.

  For your cover, find an image that is interesting enough to catch someone’s eye, but not so far beyond the norm that it seems strange. Designing covers is an art and should never be done in isolation. Get some feedback from the people around you or just post some choices to social media and let people comment. I often choose an image that is the wrong color and then hire an artist to create a version that has my desired color scheme.

  This phase is purely about the shape and congruency of the image; I can easily change the colors later.

  Planning for the Future

  Most successful series have covers that look similar. With fitness books, authors usually have a single design, and each book is a different color. There will be a picture of the author in her workout clothes that matches the color scheme of the cover.

  For one book she is in blue and the next she’s in purple and then she wears green for book three. The more consistency you have between your book designs, the stronger your brand will become. When people see covers that look similar all the time, they start to give you more and more respect. They see your design enough times, and they will think that you’re a celebrity author.

  Your initial cover should be one that you can repeat as you release more books. Some books are very similar in title, and some are a little bit different. If you look at my fist book, Serve No Master, the book cover is slightly different. It’s not a hard match, but there are a lot of consistencies. Both show an image of flight, have a simple image in between the title and author name, and have similar color schemes.

  The books are related, but not part of a series.

  I’m working on another book about writing fast. Because that book is so similar to this one, that cover will be much closer in design. I might simply take this cover and change around some of the colors to create consistency.

  You don’t have to design ten book covers before you launch the first one, but you do want to keep your future plans in mind. People like covers that are similar and make sense as part of a series. That feeling of familiarity builds trust and will increase your sales. You will also get a lot more customers who read the next book from your series as soon as they finish the first one.

  Design Yourself

  I am pretty decent at Photoshop. I know my way around layers and working with fonts, but no way would I ever try to design my cover. Unless you are an advanced graphic designer, I would recommend hiring a professional. I pay from five to twenty dollars for each of my covers.

  I can get someone who designs book covers for a living very cheaply. It doesn't make sense for me to try and create my cover. I will create mock-ups and test different color schemes on my own during the cover creation process, but I always let a professional create the final project. Even if you are a phenomenal graphic artist, there are dozens of common pitfalls.

  The font of your cover is critical. The right font can send your book into the stratosphere, but the wrong font can hurt your sales. It’s not about aesthetics; there are plenty of beautiful fonts that can’t sell a single book.

&nb
sp; Proper placement and structure of the elements in your cover is vital. If the image looks off-center or is placed strangely between the title and subtitle, it might look cool to an artist. But it will cause one of those moments where people aren’t sure why, but the covers feels weird to them. You can break congruency. People expect the elements of cover to be organized in a certain way.

  If you are an artist creating a children’s book, you may want to use one of your images on the cover. That’s wonderful. You are very talented, and I work with several brilliant artists who write children’s books. There is a huge difference between creating beautiful characters and mastering typography. Some artists purely specialize in text-based images and design.

  Take your design and hire a cover designer to convert it into a compelling cover that sells loads of your beautiful book.

  However, if you decide to create your own cover, upload it to my Facebook page, and I’ll personally leave a comment below it filled with my wisdom and advice. Other readers can also give you feedback before you take a cover into final production.

  I once created a cover by myself for a parenting book. I write books about raising my children as one of my favorite niches. The cover of this book used an image of a sleeping baby that I thought was cute. I even worked from a good book cover template. Despite all my best efforts the book tanked until I changed the cover. Even with all of my experience, I don’t have the skill to put it all together.

  Hiring Talent

  One of my friends paid over five hundred dollars for the cover of his book, but nobody reads it. The book fails the majority of the criteria I just shared with you. The cover is very cool and has an excellent artistic feel, but you cannot tell what genre the book is. The cover doesn’t look anything like other covers in the space.