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

  Between $2.99 and $9.99, Amazon bumps you up to 70%. With a book listed at $2.99, you get about two bucks a sale.

  I would love to predict your exact commission, but it fluctuates for every book. The size of your book file will affect commissions. If your book is full of high-definition images, Amazon will charge you a high transfer fee and your final commission will be lower.

  Pay close attention to your royalty band when pricing your book.

  Pricing Phases

  Your Kindle book will go through different pricing phases when you launch. When I first publish my book to Amazon, I price it at 99 cents. I then reach out to as many reviewers as I can. I send out loads of gift copies, and Amazon charges me a buck for each one. We’ll cover why this phase is so critical in the Launch and Reviews sections.

  Once your book has enough reviews to generate some traction, it is time to plan a free promotion. The free promotion should only last one or two days, and it’s a chance to get eyeballs on your book. During this promotion, you will get tons of downloads and introduce new people to you as an author.

  When the promotion ends, your book will shoot up the paid rankings for a little while. Your book should be 99 cents for a few days to generate as many sales as possible.

  Once this process is complete, you can settle on your final book price and stay there. You will only adjust pricing again when you run another promotion.

  Format Prices

  Royalties are very different on each platform. Kindle royalties are mainly based on the size of the file you upload. For Kindle Unlimited, longer books pay out more. You get paid around half a penny for each page anyone reads from your book in this program.

  With CreateSpace, where I publish all my paperbacks, the pricing is very different. Physical books exist in the real world. There is a cost to turning on the machine, printing the pages, and shipping the book out to a customer. The printing options you choose will affect your royalty.

  It costs more money to print pages in color, and choosing that option can slice your royalty to the bone. One of my friends accidentally chose color for a black and white book and lost about eighty percent of his paycheck. One little mistake dramatically hurt his bank account.

  When you upload your book to Createspace, you can choose the type of paper you want and if the cover should be glossy. Fancier features and larger trim sizes increase the printing cost and decrease your royalty. In general, your paperback royalty will be in the thirty to forty percent range.

  For your average book, the printing costs will be three to four bucks. If you try to price the paperback at $2.99, Amazon will lose money on every single sale. Even if they kept all of the money, the printing itself costs more than that.

  Createspace won’t let you sell your book at a loss. The software will automatically stop you when you try. You can price your book low enough to knock your commission to zero if you really want to. But you don’t.

  You want to price the paperback at a cost that makes sense and makes the Kindle book more enticing. As a rule of thumb, price your book at $7.99 or $8.99 to get started. This is a rough guideline and if you feel stuck, reply to one of my emails.

  Pricing By Country

  Your book will be a different price on each of the Amazon’s platforms. If you were so inclined, you could manually control the price of your book in every country where Amazon has a presence.

  This is a lot of extra work. Just let Amazon price match across platforms. This is much easier, and it’s fair for your customers. Everyone pays the same cost no matter where they live. If you want to lower the price in a particular country for a specific reason, you can.

  Don’t bother lowering the price in one country in the hopes of spiking sales in another. Each Amazon is a unique business, and there are firewalls between them. Each month you will get a direct deposit from a dozen different Amazons. Each country will pay you separately.

  Amazon Recommends

  Amazon has a very helpful tool when pricing your book. They will tell you the price that will generate the most sales and the price that will generate the most revenue. The tool is not perfect, but it is quite helpful as a guideline.

  I use it for some of my books, and I ignore it for others. It’s really up to you to play around with pricing and see how smart Amazon is. Like Grammarly, the software inside of Amazon is on the path to achieving sentience, but it isn’t quite there yet.

  23

  Become a Respected Amazon Author

  Whether you use your real name or create a pen name, you need to create a customer-facing identity. You don’t want to share every aspect of your personality and life with your audience. If I told you my position on political issues right now, I would alienate many readers. I don’t write political books, so injecting politics into my author identity doesn’t make sense.

  There are many people with the same name as me. My name is not nearly enough information to make me unique or memorable in your mind.

  There are parts of my life and personality that end up in my books and public-facing social media.

  You want to create a solid idea of who your author is, what customers like about that identity, and what pieces of information you should share. You don’t want to use any personal social media accounts as an author. If you use a profile to connect with customers that already connects to all of your real friends and family, you could experience some uncomfortable blow-through. Even if you want to share every single aspect of your life with your readership, you don’t want to violate the privacy of the people around you.

  There is nothing weirder than a fan showing up at your house or sending a friend request to one of your kids. I one time had my home address posted on a very creepy website. One of the members of that forum later murdered several people. I got very lucky, so now I also take security very seriously. If you want to know the rest of that story, listen to episode nineteen, “Dealing with Hate Mail,” on my podcast.

  Put together a file on your computer with the pieces of your life that you will share with the public: the author’s identity kit. This folder is where you store any photos that are going to get shared across your online profiles. There is no value to having a different picture on each of your social media profiles; that will only confuse your audience.

  Centralize everything to make it easier for you to remember.

  Social Media Integration

  You can integrate several pieces of social media with Amazon via your author page. Right now Amazon allows authors to connect a blog feed to their author profile, upload pictures and videos, write a biography, post upcoming events, and create a custom link.

  Your first step is to choose a custom link that matches your author name or your brand. It takes a few hours to Amazon to confirm your link, so do this step immediately. You will want to share this link at certain points in your business development, so getting the right link set up now is important. You don’t want another author with the same name grabbing the link you wanted. A big part of building a business is establishing Internet properties that sync up.

  You should already have your blog set up, so connect your RSS feed to your author page. This will automatically display your latest blog posts to your audience. Now you should begin seeing how everything connects together. There is a reason you set up and started your blog before writing your book. Now those first few blog posts are invaluable. Having content that has aged a few weeks is better than five posts you write the day after launching your book. We are creating some credibility and depth to your identity.

  Upload your primary author photo. Do not screw around with your author photo. Do not just use your favorite Facebook photo. People expect a certain look when they click on your author profile, and if you disappoint them you will lose sales. Do not use an amateur or silly photo. It should at least look like it was taken by a professional. With a pen name, just use a stock photo or drawing that fits your niche. If you’re not sure what to do, look at the profiles of competing authors in
your space, or post your picture on my Facebook wall and ask.

  You can also add book trailers, other videos and more photos to your author page. It’s really up to you how much you add to your page. As long as the content is professional, adding more will look good. You can get away with just one photo for now, but feel free to build up your profile over time.

  The Biography

  Your biography is there to excite visitors and convince them to buy more of your books. Share a few exciting parts of your history and include links to your social media profiles. You want to make it as easy as possible for people who want to connect with you to find you.

  Not every one of your readers will be able to find you using search engines. Give them a link they can copy and paste to visit your blog and other social media profiles.

  It takes up to twenty-four hours for updates to post to your profile. After you have submitted your profile, come back tomorrow to see how it looks to someone visiting your page.

  You will notice that about halfway down the page is a “see more” button. The bottom half of your profile is hidden from casual viewers. Your links should be placed above this button, ensuring that every single visitor to your page sees them. The way things look when we submit them is often very different from what customers see.

  With every step of this process, take the time to look at your profile from the customer’s side. Customer experience is everything. We want to make things as easy and pleasant as possible for our readers.

  Upgrade Your Book Page

  After you have linked your first book to your profile, make sure that you go and upgrade the sales page for that book. As you release different formats of your book, they will connect to your author profile. You are allowed to make different changes to the listings for each format. Check out how your book page looks for the paperback, digital and audio versions.

  Whenever you get a fantastic review somewhere other than Amazon, you want to share it on your book page using Author Central.

  These little steps add up to build the foundation for a real business, rather than a flash in the pan book.

  Upload Your Picture

  Before you upload any pictures to the Internet, scrub the metadata from them. If you are using a stock image photo, that photo will have links hidden inside of it back to the original site. If you took a picture with your smartphone, it will have GPS data embedded into it. Someone could download the photo, copy and paste that number into Google Earth and have a bird’s eye view of your house.

  It probably won’t happen, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

  On Mac, there is a fabulous free program called ImageOptim. It cleans out all private data from image files and optimizes them for online display. You can drag your entire author folder into this program, and it will detect and clean up all of your photos.

  On PC, you just right-click on the image and select properties. Click on the Details tab and click “remove properties and personal information.”

  It only takes a few seconds to scrub your files, and it is worth the effort. You probably won’t have a problem if you forget this step, but it’s better to do it now.

  If you want to see what data is hidden in one of your photos, just right-click and select properties. You might just be surprised what information was embedded into the back of the photo.

  Most social media sites and Amazon will scrub your file when you upload it, but your blog certainly won’t. It’s better to clear up everything now just to be on top of it.

  24

  How To Get Reviews Even If You Don’t Have Any Friends

  The key to success within any system is to know the rules. If you tried to play rugby without knowing the rules, you would have no chance of success. Without knowing how Amazon ranks books, you will struggle to succeed.

  There are three key metrics that Amazon tracks and values above all others. The first is traffic, and this is where independent authors often fail themselves. They work hard creating and crafting the perfect book. They upload the book, following all the correct steps. Then they think the work is over. Amazon will do all the work of selling their book while they kick back and relax.

  After they sell ten copies to friends and family, the book drops into the dark recesses at the bottom of the Amazon rankings. They did everything right as an author but failed abysmally as a publisher.

  Once you upload your book, you become the publisher. You need to make those sales happen, not just rely on Amazon. Amazon rewards those who take action, and has zero mercy for the passive.

  Amazon wants you to bring visitors from other websites. The more people who visit your page directly, rather than through searches and categories, the more Amazon will love you. Traffic is a crucial metric that you don’t want to skip. Don’t worry; I’ll show you how to get all the traffic you need in the Launch section.

  The second metric that Amazon looks at is sales. This metric is about more than just total sales. Amazon cares far more about conversion.

  Imagine that there are two books about curing tinnitus. They each sell ten copies a day. Book A sold ten copies, with one hundred visitors. Book A is converting at 10%. Ten percent of the people who visit the page for book A make a purchase.

  Book B also sold ten copies, but this book had one thousand visitors. Both books seem great because they each sold ten copies, but book B is converting at 1%. Book A is converting ten times better.

  If you could buy a lottery ticket, which one would you choose? Do you want a one percent chance of winning or ten percent?

  Amazon is a business. The purpose of Amazon is to sell product. Amazon is going to actively reward book A, and book B will continue to be pushed down the rankings unless something changes. For Amazon, failure to convert is an unforgivable sin.

  The third metric is reviews. This metric is harder to track because Amazon uses a very complicated algorithm. There are several factors the go into their formula: total number of reviews, age of reviews, and average review score. These factors are all based on a foundational metric. What is your review conversion percentage?

  How many books do you have to sell to generate one review?

  The answer to that question is the secret of the universe. You must actively do everything in your power to beg, borrow and appeal for more reviews.

  The average reader has no understanding of how Amazon operates. When they see a book with loads of reviews, they assume their vote won’t count, so they don’t leave a review.

  If your book has a thousand reviews, but none in the past year, Amazon will put your book out to pasture. The book was awesome, but its heyday is over. They will play the orchestral music and drag you off the stage.

  More than anything else, once your book is live you must actively pursue reviews. Do everything you can to get more reviews. Don’t do anything unethical, but you must actively pursue reviews on a continual basis.

  White Hat Black Hat

  Let me be very clear here. Amazon has zero mercy for people caught breaking the rules. One of the guys in my original mastermind, when I was learning the Kindle system, got caught. He was messing around with reviews and the Kindle Unlimited system.

  I didn’t ask him exactly what he was doing. As soon as he told me that one sentence, I knew he was banned for life. He’s back working in a cubicle now.

  Do not pay for reviews or get suckered in by sketchy review services.

  Amazon's central server is close to achieving full sentience. Amazon tracks every single thing you do on the site. Amazon tracks IPs, drops cookies, and tracks locations. If you logged into Amazon once from your cousin’s computer ten years ago, Amazon still knows.

  Read Amazon’s rules and abide by them. It’s fine to solicit reviews from readers and give away copies in exchange for reviews, but it’s not ok to pay for reviews. Never accept or solicit reviews from someone who hasn’t read your book. That stuff is garbage. Don’t waste your time playing that silly game.

  Turn Readers into Reviewers


  Your first task is to improve your reader-to-reviewer ratio. Do everything in your power to remind your readers that you need reviews. If you can convey the importance of reviews to your audience, more of them will take action. Seeking out external reviewers and sending out copies is fine when you are first launching, but you want to set processes in place now to generate reviews over time.

  End of Book

  The final page of your book should be an appeal for a rating. When someone is reading a book on their Kindle, asking them to fire up the computer to leave you a review is too much. Very few people will do it.

  Instead, ask them to rate the book. They can just click on one to five stars to rate your book without leaving their Kindle. These ratings aren’t as good as reviews, but they are WAY better than nothing. If you can get a reader to rate your book, you are on the first step to succeeding. You have convinced your reader to take an action.

  Email List

  Do everything in your power to get readers onto your email list. Offer them amazing free gifts and additional information. You don’t need to sell them anything to grow your business. I’m giving away as much content as I can to anyone who gives me their email address. I don’t have any downline product to sell to my readers.

  I want that email address so that I can build the relationship and use that opportunity to ask for an honest review. If someone left a star rating, it’s much easier for them to write out a full review beneath that rating. Amazon stores all the data to make it easy for people to upgrade and edit their reviews.