Second, you go into top secret review phase. This is where your book is 99 cents, and you send out review copies to anyone who will take one. You don’t announce your book to anyone yet. It’s on Amazon, but you don’t tell anyone about it. This phase is crucial because it is when you get verified reviews. A verified review means Amazon knows the person bought your book, and it is worth ten times the weight of an unverified review. You need at least ten, and preferably more than twenty, verified reviews before this phase is complete.
Third, you have your promotional day. The book will be free for 24-48 hours, and you focus on getting as much traffic as you possibly can. Buy as much traffic as you can afford and get the word out about your book. You want to get all of your ducks in a row before this promotion. All of your formats should be available and linked to one listing.
Fourth, when your promotion ends, put your book back at 99 cents for a day or two. Here’s why. Some people on those free book lists won’t notice your promotion until a day or two later. We miss emails all the time. Plenty of people will go check out your book. If it’s back to $7.99 they will be disappointed they missed your chance and move on. The ones who have Kindle Unlimited might grab a copy if you're lucky.
If the same person comes to your book the day after a promotion and it’s 99 cents, there is a good chance they will grab it. They missed the free day, but it’s still one discount.
After a few days at 99 cents, it’s time to bring your book up to full price. This is when your book starts making your money, and it’s properly launched. If you followed each step in this process, then your book will maintain that momentum. To keep the sales coming in, you need a continual flow of reviews.
We already handled that by setting up your last page and email appeals. This infrastructure will keep your book generating revenue for a very long time.
Before You Upload
Before you upload your book to Amazon, you want to make sure all your ducks are in a row. Put as much time and energy into perfecting your writing as you can. If you can afford an editor, it will be worth it in the long run. I will post updated links to editors I find with reasonable prices and turnaround times.
You want your book to be as close to perfect as possible before you send it out into the world. If you can, generate some pre-release reviews so that your book can hit the ground running.
Review Phase
For two weeks, getting reviews is your full-time job. If you don’t take this phase seriously, all of your other work will have been for nothing. As customers, we all have a threshold for the number of reviews a book needs to have before we take it seriously.
Nobody wants to buy a book with a single review on it; we simply don’t trust it.
If your book followed my entire method and is any good at all, you will be able to get enough reviews to get your book out there. Put in the effort now and you will be rewarded with long-term revenue and powerful sales numbers.
Free Days
Your free day is when you show Amazon that you can bring external traffic. You are establishing that you take your book seriously and that you are Amazon’s partner. The site appreciates people who generate their own traffic, and rewards them.
Make sure you get as much traffic as you need to dominate your categories during this promotion. This effort will pay for itself as soon as you switch to back to paid.
Back to Paid
Leaving your book discounted for a few days will help to carry over that free day momentum into the paid rankings. For every category, Amazon has two sets of top one hundred books. There are the paid top one hundred and the free top one hundred.
Having a few 99-cent days will bridge the gap between these two lists for you.
Maintain the Momentum
The key to maintaining momentum is setting up your structures correctly. Setting up your email system to encourage people to leave in-depth reviews will make a big difference.
The game does not end the moment you upload your book to Amazon; that is only the beginning. As new books enter the market, they will attempt to steal your market share. Amazon tests new listing styles all the time and will frequently change how your page appears.
Tend your book listing like a garden to ensure that it grows revenue for you every month. Be active in the cultivation of your rankings. When your book has a drop-off, you will need to do a big review push and then a free day promotion to get back up there.
Depending on how your book is doing, you may need to run a promotion every few months or once a year. These secondary promotions don’t require the same intensity as your first one. Just appeal for reviews, make the book free for a day and then announce to all the free sites. You usually don’t need to buy any traffic for follow-up promotions.
27
How to Make Ten Times More Money
We talked at the very start about building a business. Now it’s time to magnify your income exponentially. This section is where we turn you from an independent author to indecently wealthy.
Some authors are unaware of the universe outside of Amazon, and if that includes you, please allow me to open your eyes. Books on Amazon are the bottom of the market. I come from the direct response world, and the first book I wrote in that market sells for $47, and it sells loads of copies every single day. People will pay a LOT more for the same content outside of Amazon. Once you launch your book on Amazon, building an external infrastructure will allow you to sell more expensive items and generate a lot more revenue.
You can sell loads of amazing things to your audience every single day. As long as you provide your new list with lots of value, they will be glad to stick with you for the long haul.
For every dollar you make within Amazon, your list should generate another ten dollars in net revenue for you. If you are making ten dollars a day on royalties, this chapter will put another zero in there and get you to a hundred bucks.
Build a Tribe
The mailing list is how you cultivate and grow your tribe. A tribe is more than just a following or a fanbase. A tribe is something that is powerful and wonderful. If you can build a tribe of just 1,000 people, you are set for life and will never have to work again.
A tribe is a group of people that follow you and are part of the journey for a long time. Serve No Master is my brand, and it’s the message of my tribe. It’s about helping people to open up revenue streams and giving them total control of their destiny. This book is just one method to achieving that path.
When you publish your first book and it actually works, you are going to turn from a reader into a member of my tribe. Nothing turns people into believers like making them money. I have total faith in my system, and I know that if you take action, you will see remarkable results.
I want people to be a part of my tribe for years, not months. I want to help you build your entire business over the next two decades. I want to be there as you launch book one and book twenty, as you build a giant brand and then sell it and sail off into the sunset.
Building a tribe is about taking the long view. Giving your people as much value as possible and rewarding their loyalty with success. I have some more advanced Kindle courses. I sell a private coaching course that’s pretty expensive. But there aren’t links to those anywhere in this book. I might eventually mention them to you in an email, but that won’t be for a while.
I would much rather you launch your first book, make a little money and then use that money to invest in my more advanced material. I believe in funding your training from profits, not debt.
I get several emails a week from people who want my advanced training and want to put it on a credit card or borrow money from a family member. If that is your situation, I will not accept your money. I will not put anyone in a financially precarious position.
I teach several methods of making money fast that don’t require any investment. You can follow this system and get your first book onto Amazon without spending a penny. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you might h
ave even read this book for free. That’s great! I have no problem with that because Amazon still pays me.
On my site, I teach a method for writing blog posts as a ghost writer that pays up to $100 an hour. You can raise enough capital in six weeks to fund anything you want. If you can’t afford it, please don’t buy another course from me.
You bought this book, and that makes you a part of my tribe. It’s my responsibility to take care of you before I take care of myself. I already live on a tropical island in paradise. My life is taken care of. Let’s focus on you first.
This is the tribe mindset, and you should have it with your followers in any space. Let your desire for their good fortune always come first.
Sell More Books
The best thing to do with your list and growing tribe is selling more books. There are two ways to do this. The first way is to ask your tribe to share your book on social media and post reviews.
I just got an email today that was AWESOME. This great dude wrote me a long email about how inspired he was by Serve No Master. He was so excited that he drew an awesome picture of a robot waving around a copy of the book. It was so cool.
I emailed him back and asked him to post his email as a review to Amazon and to include that picture. I want everyone to see it. When was the last time you saw a book review that included a picture of a robot waving around the book? His enthusiasm in that review will increase my page conversion. More people will buy the book when they read his review.
Then those people will get excited, and soon I will have loads of pictures of robots and unicorns and goblins holding copies of my book in the reviews.
The second way to sell more books is to let your readers know about the other books you’ve written. All the people who joined my list when they read Serve No Master have no idea that this book exists. When they read that book, I hadn’t written it yet. If they visited my author page, they only saw a single book.
Now that this book is live, I emailed all of them to let them know about this book, and a lot of them grabbed a copy. It was a nice boost to my ranking and helped to get me some early momentum. (At least I hope that’s what happens. I’m writing this before I upload the book, obviously.)
Your list should get follow-up emails about your other related books to let them know your offers. “Did you enjoy my book on push-ups? I have a great book on squats that you’re going to love…”
Many people will be glad to find out about your other books that are relevant to them. When you send someone back to Amazon, you can get paid twice for the same sale.
Get Paid Twice
Amazon has an affiliate program. They pay you every time you send someone a recommendation. The program starts at a 4% commission and grows up to 8% if you send enough people each month. You might think that that’s peanuts, but bear with me.
If you sell your book for $2.99, your royalty is around two bucks. If you send customers through your affiliate link, Amazon will pay you an additional twelve cents. That seems like small potatoes until you apply volume. If you sell ten books a day through recommendations, that’s an extra dollar a day, and I’m just getting started.
Amazon will give you 4% of everything that person buys for the next twenty-four hours. If your reader buys your book you make twelve cents, but if they purchase a TV a few hours later, you could earn a commission of over $100. That’s pretty cool.
You get paid twice for selling your book. You get the royalty for being the author and a little bump for being the affiliate.
You can then recommend other stuff on Amazon that is relevant to your space. If your audience suffers from tinnitus, noise-canceling headphones might help. If they are struggling with baldness, a great hat recommendation can go a long way. If you are teaching people about yoga, they need to get their yoga mats and pants somewhere.
You know that your audience likes to buy stuff from Amazon because they already bought your book there. Recommending other cool stuff that will benefit them is a natural and profitable progression.
Sell Direct
When you sell products directly from your website, you can charge much higher price points. You don’t have to share the money, and you can turn a few pennies into some serious money.
Let’s imagine that you wrote an awesome yoga book. You run a small studio in your town, but you want to reach that wider audience. Your book is doing pretty well. You sell ten copies a day at $2.99 and walk away with $20 profit. That’s an extra $600 a month in income. It’s not enough to let you retire from teaching classes eight hours a day, but it’s a start.
Here’s how I’m going to make you rich. You get some of your students to help you out. You set up professional lights and borrow some cameras for the day and record your own enhanced yoga DVDs. You have video content to offer your readers which gives them increased value.
You can sell your videos for $17 each on your website. You can even sell a package of three hour-long sessions for $29. That’s a pretty good deal. Three videos for less than two would cost on their own. Because you are in charge of your operation, you deliver the videos as direct downloads. Your customers don’t have to wait a week for a DVD to show up, and you don’t have to pay shipping costs.
After processing fees, you’ll make around $16 profit from each sale of your single video. A single video sale is worth EIGHT times more than a single book sale. When you get people to transition from your book, you make a lot more money.
If you convert just one buyer from your book to grabbing a yoga video from you each day, your income jumps from $600 up to $1,080.
That number is not quite accurate. You have your customer’s email information. You can send yoga tips and blog posts. You get multiple touches with your customers. You get multiple chances to sell your video, so you can expect around thirty percent of your book customers to buy a video eventually.
That pushes your income to over $2,000 a month. Just by offering something more valuable at a reasonable price point directly from your website. Removing Amazon from the equation allows you to triple your income with one extra day of work.
We’re closer to that ten to one income ratio, but not quite yet.
Designing a Free Gift
The free gift is where many new authors hit the wall. I see a lot of new authors who go out and buy some garbage PLR written by a non-native speaker and throw a few box shots into their book to sell it.
That’s not cool at all.
I’m going to open the kimono here. Once I decided on the free gift for this book I spent AGES on the image design. I spent hours messing around with the images to get them exactly how I want. High-quality images convey value and effort. The effort is real because I spent a long time working on the image myself.
If possible, your free gift should be worth more than your Kindle book. Give away music, an audiobook version of your content, a short story, a printable version, or anything else you can think of.
The challenge with the free gift is that it’s unique to each niche and offer. Take a look at what the people around you are offering, and beat them. That’s my primary approach to marketing in general. I can’t give you one-size-fits-all advice because that’s so disingenuous. Romance readers want a different gift than people buying cookbooks.
If you are struggling to come up with a gift, reply to one of my emails, and I’ll help you come up with something awesome. I usually try to find a way to magnify the value of the book in some way. This book teaches you how to make money selling books on Amazon, and using audiobooks to boost your income from the same work is an excellent value on top of that. You will increase your income 30% if you let me email you. That’s a pretty good trade-off.
The key is to give your readers as much value as possible.
The Mechanics
The technical process starts with setting up your emailing software. This software is often called an autoresponder. The two main products I like are called Aweber and GetResponse. I have affiliate links to each service on my w
ebsite. If you sign up through one of my links, I would be super grateful, and I will be glad to help you if you get stuck in the technical part of the process.
Once you have chosen your software, create an opt-in form using their provided HTML tool. I know it sounds scary, but it takes thirty seconds. It creates a box where people can enter their email address and a button they click to submit. You put this little form on a page all by itself on your website.
Like at the start of this book, you create a link on the first page of your book that takes people to that page. Kindle will automatically load a web browser that takes them to your page. When set up correctly, your reader can fill in their email address, hit send and then click the X to close the page and be back reading your book in under five seconds.
Your software then captures that email address and starts sending a series of automatic emails. The first message is a thank-you message that includes their free gift. The following messages are designed to strengthen the relationship and eventually magnify your income.
Emails for Dollars
I promised that I would increase your income tenfold, and here is where I’m going to do it. Selling your own stuff is cool and selling stuff on Amazon is nice, but it takes time to make products and Amazon only pays 4% to new affiliates.
Let’s continue with our yoga example:
You have a book teaching people the basics of yoga. Once someone reads that book, there are several other ways you can give them value. You can help them find a great local school by analyzing reviews and generating a recommendation for them. You can also point them to your favorite yoga DVDs on Amazon. You can even recommend great yoga pants or a yoga mat. There are many directions you can take your audience.
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 12
