In my works as a copywriter I’ve had the opportunity to work with many self-published fiction writers. I’ve been able to come on as a sort of writing coach for many of them. Not so much writing as in putting proper words and sentences together or story telling, though I have done that before, but rather how to get a career off the ground and launched. There are many principles that hold true across all career launches and there are things that are unique to writing.
I know self-publishing is a growing field that many of my readers have interest in, maybe you do, because of this I wanted to put together some advice on how to get a self-publishing career up off the ground and going. I’ll also include some resources at the end that should help get you pointed in the right direction, marketing wise. I guess I should also say that we’ll not be discussing craft here. There’s a lot that can be said about that and that’s something you need to have nailed down at a basic level.
The better your book is made, as in the better writer, story teller, and more knowledge of the tropes and such of your genre that you have…the easier it is going to be to market. No matter how good you market a bad book it’s not going to do a lot of good. And more than likely the first book that you write is not going to be good.
So that’s something that takes time. But saying you have that accomplished let’s run through the basics of getting a self-published author career off the ground.
The Preliminary Steps
First off you need to have decent writing craft. You need to have the basics covered of how to write well and more importantly, how to tell a story that is engaging and genre appropriate. Then there are some other basics you need to have covered before we get into marketing. First and foremost you need to have a great, genre appropriate, cover. The cover is your number one marketing tool and the number one thing that you should be spending money on.
Don’t skimp on a cover, it will come back to bite you. With modern editing software you can get decent covers made either looking at premade covers or getting a stockphoto and having someone do it up. There’s no excuse for a crappy cover. After that you should know how to write an engaging blurb, meaning how to get people to want to buy you’re book. It’s essentially a mini sales letter for your book and you can use a formula like AIDA for great results. Don’t forget to put a call to action at the end.
You should also read in your genre. In the top 100 on kindle. Look at the covers that sell, the books that sell, read the reviews, figure out what worked for people, along with what did not. Learn, learn, learn all that you can about the market. The kindle top 100 in your genre you should know like the back of your hand. See what has staying power, read it, and pick up ones that scorch up the charts as well.
As always you need to read, read, read in your genre. Not just the classics but the modern best sellers as well.
The Key To Getting The Fire Started
Its much easier to keep a fire going than get it started, same with a career. Understand that you need to have money set aside because you’re going to be investing money in this career without a positive ROI for a decent period of time. I know many people say “You have to put in time or money. So when starting out put in time and don’t worry about money.” but here’s the thing, if the money’s not coming then you can put all the time in the world in, it’s not going to make an appreciable difference.
Sure put your time in writing and getting everything together. But to start making money, you’re going to have to spend money. You can’t just ‘time’ your way to a profitable career. You have to have money coming in or on the side to get this thing going. You can only gather kindling for so long before its time to start the flame. Anyways, be prepared to spend a few grand the first few years starting out on marketing alone, at a minimum. And this doesn’t include editing or covers or anything of that matter.
This covers what we’ll be talking about next. You can probably get by with less than that but to get this thing up in running in a few years time where it can replace the average salary then yeah, a few grand is going to be minimum. So look at 2.5k to 3k a year in marketing. If you have a decent job then really not that bad. If you don’t then I’d recommend getting a decent job before trying to be an entrepreneur. Check out the wealth section of the site for more information on that.
The Marketing Plan
Let’s look at marketing like a pyramid. At the base we have newsletter subscribers. I’m not going to get into too much detail here but understand that having an email sign up list is the number one thing as a self-published author. Have a good reader magnet, which means free thing you offer for signing up to your list, and a decent autoresponder set up. You need to send out a newsletter, I’d recommend weekly but you can get by with monthly, though more than that and I just don’t think people are going to remember who you are all that well.
But now let’s get to what you’ll be spending that three grand on. And that is the following.
- Newsletter promotions.
- Promotional sites.
- Advertising platforms.
Those are the three you should master. Let’s do a brief overview of each then I’ll link some resources that will help you sort it out. Again what we’re doing here is simply setting up a decent framework for everything.
So first off you need to get subscribers on your email list. Some will sign up through your backmatter (links in the back of your book) but it’ll be a long time before you get a decent audience that way. So what you need to do is use sites like Prolific Works, BookFunnel, and I believe Story Origen also does these. But use them to set up newsletter promotions. Where you give a free novel/novella and in exchange you get signups to your email list.
These signups should be put in a separate list from your “organic” signup list and put through an autoresponder sequence before being brought over to your main list. You want to explain to them what they’re signing up for and give them an option to unsubscribe before bringing them over.
Then when you have a decent email list going, 1,000 or so “active” subscriber. Meaning that they’ve at least opened a few emails. You want to look to promote on Promotional Sites. Sites like FreeBooksy, BookDoggy, and so on. David Gaughran has a curated list of promotional sites that are worth the money and I believe Nicolas Erik does as well. Check them out if you want to do this.
What you want to do is promo stack your books. So set your book at a low price 99 cents or free. Then set up “ads” to go out on each of these platforms, drip this out over a week. So say one promo site Monday, a bigger one Tuesday, an even bigger one Wednesday, two decent sized ones Thursday, and then the biggest Friday. Or something like that.
This helps your book “stick” in Amazon. Something I’ll put you to more information about later.
Then, if those go well, and to really scale it up. You’ll want to look for an advertising platform to use. Amazon, FaceBook, and BookBub are three of the most popular. You can lose a ton of money on all three if you’re not careful so be smart about this. Research and test small before going big.
But these three things are the basis of taking this full time.
Recommended Resources For You
Now, a lot of this may be confusing and that’s understandable. This wasn’t drinking out of a firehose this was drinking out of a waterfall. I’m going to recommended some courses and books for you to really put it all together. Here they are.
David Gaughran has a free course called Starting From Zero that you should take. As well as pick up all his nonfiction books on Amazon.
Chris Fox has a collection of nonfiction writing books that are extremely helpful as well.
Then Tammi Labrecque has her Newsletter Ninja series you should read.
There are more but those should get you started in the right direction.
Hope that helps and thanks for reading.
If anything I said here interests you I’d highly recommend you check out The Ultimate Alpha Collection which is a compilation of 16 of my books for the price of 5. It covers everything from being a man to making money to getting the right mindset to getting girls to fighting and more and is a resource no man should be without. Pick up your copy today!
-Charles Sledge
