Showing posts with label Amazon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amazon. Show all posts
Friday, June 26, 2020
Over $322,650 in Book Sales on Amazon
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Where Do I Self-Publish My Book?
Where Do I Publish My Book?
The main self-publishing path leads to Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Kindle publishes both e-books and paperback–print-on-demand books. You create your book using programs like MS-Word, Adobe InDesign and PowerPoint. Once that is complete you create a cover. The two files are upload to kdp.amazon.com. Files get reviewed for any technical issues but not editorial. Once approved, you hit publish and you are a published author. Now starts the hard part, marketing and selling your book. With self-publishing, everything is under your control. You keep all the rights to your content.
There are also many other outlets for publishing your book. Sites such as Lulu.com, Blurb.com, Barns & Noble Press, Bookbaby.com, Direct2Print.com, Smashwords.com, and IngramSpark.com and more. The message here is that you can publish your book when and how you want and under your own control.
Resources, Self-Publishing:
E-Book Publishers
• KDP.Amazon.com, the main e-book site, an e-book reader, free, https://kdp.amazon.com
• Smashwords.com distributes e-books to over 80 outlets and devices, free, https://www.smashwords.com/
• Draft 2 Digital.com, free, https://www.draft2digital.com/
Print-on-Demand Paperback Books
• KDP.Amazon.com, paperback, print-on-demand, a division of Amazon, free, https://kdp.amazon.com
Combination of Paperback, Hard Cover and e-books
These companies offer a variety of options including e-book, print, spiral/coil binding, saddle stitch/staples and pdf with distribution options
• IngramSpark.com, print-on-demand, world’s largest book distributor to book and gift stores, some fees, http://www.ingramspark.com/
• Lulu.com, similar to KDP.Amazon but with more printing options, paperback, hardcover, spiral, saddle, free, https://www.lulu.com/
• Barnes & Noble Press, formally Nook Press, a new, revised publishing platform from Barnes & Noble, now offering print, e-book and a possible relationship with their stores if you can sell 1,000 books over a year. https://press.barnesandnoble.com/
• BookBaby.com, a variety of different pay packages, fee, https://www.bookbaby.com/
• Books-A-Million D.I.Y. with BAM! Publishing, write, publish, print and distribute in print or e-book, http://www.bampublish.com/
• Blurb.com, photo and art books, free, http://www.blurb.com/
Book Printer with Access to Bookstore Distribution
• IngramSpark.com, print-on-demand, world’s largest book distributor to book and gift stores, some fees, http://www.ingramspark.com/
Excerpt from my new book, The Self-Publishing Manual: Create and Publish Your Own Print or e-Book, by J. Bruce Jones. To get a PDF version Click Here
The Self-Publishing Manual is Now Available on Amazon.com, Please click here to buy the book
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
CreateSpace is Closing and All Books are Moving to Kindle Direct Publishing
This is the big news that we have been waiting for. We have been watching the signs for a while. Kindle has been adding services and support around their new print side. This September Amazon announced the closing of Createspace.com and the moving of all books KDP.Amazon.com.
You can either do this process yourself when you get the notice or CreateSpace will move your books for you if you do nothing. This is being rolled out across their customers, so watch for your notice. I got my notices a while back and today I moved my books over to Kindle. It was seamless and took about 5 minutes, start to finish. The only thing that doesn't move are covers that you made using CreateSpace Cover creator. You will need to remake them with the Kindle Cover Creator.
Once the books are ported over you will need to match your print book up with your ebook if you have versions of both. It is pretty easy to do. If you didn't have a KDP account, Kindle will create one for you and you will have to enter your bank and tax information in order to get paid. The other thing that is different are the sales reports and they actually are a little better I think. We have an historical report now that is pretty cool.
I am excited to see what kinds of services they will adding. Already they have some pretty good support videos on how to use their site. Here is a quick video I put together on how to move your books from CreateSpace to Kindle.
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Monday, July 9, 2018
Understanding How Amazon Royalties Work for CreateSpace Books
Understanding How Amazon Royalties Work for CreateSpace Books
[00:00] I Bruce Jones here and in this video I'm going to talk about book royalties. One of the questions that comes up a lot for authors who are just jumping into the self-publishing model and selling their books on Amazon is how much does it cost, how much do I have to pay to print the book, how much does Amazon take, how much are the royalties, and I get how does all that kind of work? So in this video I'm going to try to demystify a little of that and answer some of the questions that you might have about that. So we're going to primarily just focused on paperback books and this is my newest book, I Want to Publish My Book But I Don't Know How. This is a book that's created using print on demand. Print on demand is a service offered by Amazon and lots of other companies.
A customer places an order on Amazon for this book, a single order is sent to a company called Createspace. They print the book and ship it to the customer. They take their money, Amazon takes their money and you get your piece or your royalty. So how does that work and how can I figure out what my costs are going to be and all that kind of stuff. So we're using a service called Createspace. Createspace is the print on demand side of Amazon. It's where we upload our files. It's a free service to print all these books. And I'm now the author of over 40 books. So I have coloring books like this. I have music books. This is a full color one that have cords and things.
[01:30] I have children's picture books all color. Look at that. All of this color. It's great with that beautiful, beautiful book. I have all different kinds of books. And I print all of these paperbacks with Createspace. You may never have heard of it, but it's in the sort of the back office end of Amazon and it manages all of this. You can also do this through kindle and kindle hhas traditionally been the ebook publishing side of Amazon, but they're now also offering the ability to do paperback books. So a lot of this will apply to what they do too. Createspace is a free service. It's where you manage all your book accounts, upload your files. CreateSpace moves your book over to Amazon and they pay you the royalty fees, they do the whole thing. It's all done sort of behind the scenes and they also have a lot of sort of, um, services and, and tools that you can use to kind of help get you going and understand how the process works.
So I'm just starting out, I want to of understand the royalty thing so I'd go up here to books and you're ready to publish a trade paperbacks. I click on that. You get basically a page of all kinds of resources and you can learn about your cover, the interior and all of these books. To publish a book takes two pdf files, an interior file for the inside. And then the a cover file, it gets uploaded and you can learn about the sizes and things like that. All of that's right here. So it's, it's pretty good. A black and white books color, different sizes, all different sizes, all that kind of stuff. But we're going to just focus on royalties, which is what everybody wants to know about how much money am I going to make? Um, so we're going to start here.
[03:08] This is a free tool you can kind of use to kind of do some what if scenarios and then I'll take you inside to my account and show you how that really works out. But the money is, it's up on this page. And again this is under books published and trademark and we just hit royalties right there. And you get little calculator that shows you how much money you have. So when any book is published, just like any product, this is a product. So whether I was doing a pen or paper clips or magnifying glass, anything, um, there are costs involved as the manufacturing costs. Then there's a markup that goes in there usually to your distributor. So our wholesaler, and then there's also a market that goes to the retailer, so in this case Amazon is the retailer and the manufacturer is create space, but there's costs that go in all those little steps and there's also cost they're involved in just managing the ecommerce side of Amazon.
[04:11] So I have other ecommerce things and there's a lot of costs that go in and building the shopping cart and managing the databases and all that kind of stuff. All that costs them money. So it all hell less taken out. Createspace is a free service. In other words, we can upload our files. It doesn't cost us anything to print, but the costs are taken out of the sales price. So if we have a $10 book, um, some money is taken out and it goes to Createspace for printing, some goes to Amazon for managing in, some goes to you. So those are the royalties, the part that comes to you. That's the part we care about. Um, so let's just sort of look at this, which is a couple of little what if scenarios. So you can kind of see how this works. So you just picked the black and white.
[04:51] So any color. This is the black and white book. Everything inside here is black and white. If there's any color in here, even just one page. This is a color book is regarded as a color book. Um, and that's more expensive to print even though the whole book, maybe I'll be black and white except for that one page. It's still a color book. So if you're going to put color in your book, spread it out and put it everywhere. I'm kind of like, I did find this book, so I made my head's color and make my pictures color. So you're going to put color, use color, trim size is the size. So this particular book, let's just look at this one, eight and half by 11 and every book, that'd be different. Different costs for every book. How many pages? Whereas the size, that kind of color, black and white.
[05:32] And this book, this particular one is 96 pages. So it's just your 96, the black and white, eight and half by 1196. And for easy argument sense, we're just going to make this $10. I think I actually sell this book on Amazon for nine 95. I like that. Around that $10 mark hit calculate and this tells me the royalty. This is how much money I'm going to make. So there are two channels that marked here. There's the Amazon channel and that's this general channel right here. And then there is expanded distribution which are other channels that createspace will send your book off too. So I've seen my books on Barnes and noble books a million. There are many, many other retailers that they send the book off to him because there's another company involved. You're going to have more royalties, is more fees going to everybody gets their little piece.
[06:24] So you'll notice it's a lot less of a dollar 85. I try to have my books between 2:50 to 3:50, somewhere in there and my royalties. That's where I'm usually comfortable. And that compares to traditional publishers where the royalties are seventy cents to a dollar. So just self publishing, not counting all the other benefits we get from self publishing. You make more money if you do this, especially if you're good at marketing, you make a lot more money from the royalties from your book. But this is a very decent royalty for this book. For a book like this, I'm just the coloring book. I'm never going to compete with, you know, the three 95. I can't get the book down that low, you know, Hong Kong publishers. But for me for doing this, for not having any costs, just make a book. This is fantastic so they can see that so much and make.
[07:10] Then Amazon also sells in Europe, so there's the how much you'd make there and a Great Britain for the first one in this one down here is Europe. So that's pretty cool. The three 85 is my royalty for the book. That's what I get. That's what they pay me. Now, if I wanted to switch this around a little bit, let's just try a couple other scenarios. Let's just say this was a full color book and I'm going to leave the bleed images that it doesn't really matter what the bleed is stuff. We're just going to keep this simple. So full color, eight and a half. I let him. Let's say I had this as a color book, right? What does that do it $10. So 96 pages. My calculate your notice. I'm minus a dollar 57. I'm not charging enough. There aren't enough. There's enough money in there because color is a different printing political printing process.
[07:55] So this book is more expensive to print in color than black and white, so you can. So I need to charge more money for this book and this is where part of the decisions make when you're creating your book is how does it fit in the market? What am I, what am I competitor's pricing? Where does that fit in my too expensive? Could I change something? Can I change the size? And it changed the page count, that kind of thing to get into where I want to be. So let's just raise this up. So anyways, I remember at $10 it was three 85. So it's about, so it's 38 percent is my royalty. That's pretty cool. All right. 14, nine. Let's try that. 14 95 calculate. We're going to pretend this is a color book. I'm in the plus. I got a good dollar 40 but I'm still not unexpanded distribution.
[08:43] Expensive enough. Dollar 59. I can use a turnoff. Expanded. Just don't worry about it if I don't want to get too expensive or I raised my price stray 1995 and see what that does. And now I'm in the plus on both of them. So that was a decision I made when I did this book. This was I charged most of my books are in the $10. 14 95 range. I think I try to 24, 95 for this book. It's all color, has a lot of pages and I'm at. This is where I ran into a problem. I wanted to make sure I was making enough royalties to cover the cost of the book. So. So that's just something that's a little scenario you can kind of play with this royalty calculator member. It's under, under books, right up here, publishing a trademark and then it's on the royalties right here.
[09:32] You can kind of play their scenarios and see what you can, where does your book fit in, how much money you're going to make. And am I charging enough for the book? That's a big one in my charging it up. All right, let's go inside and I'll just show you sort of a let's go and look at some of the royalty stuff. So this is my account isn't my dashboard. This is the month of July. But let's go back to June. You can see I have four nine bookstore, but I want to go into a detailed royalty here. And actually before we do that, let me just show you inside where this is. So let's just pick a book. I'm just pick my world maps regional book and this is the Dashboard for this particular book and you'll notice right over here in the district and your distribution a column, you have channels and pricing.
[10:24] So if I go to pricing, you'll see almost the identical calculator looks like this. I can put my price in, but also tells me this number right here, the minimum list price that I can go down so I can mess around with this book down to 5:38, which is a good piece of information to know. You don't really know that. You have to kind of figure that out from the other calculator. You're like, okay, you just keep moving the number down until they go, Eh, you can't go anymore. But here they tell you what that number is. So this is how low I could make this book if I wanted to. Um, I chose nine 95. It's basically the same size as business book and I get a royalty payment of three 82 expanded is a dollar 83. So that kind of tells me where this book sits.
[11:10] If I go to my channels, remember we talked a little bit about channels and channels are aware it's going to be sold out through the default are um, are these two ones right here? Amazon.com, which is this one, and then Europe, so they also sell the books in England and then they sell them in Europe and so those are just by default where they go. So those ones were always there and then you can pick the expanded distribution if you want. Now some people just shut these off and they make it seem to make a little bit more money because I kind bouncing the things, um, with their regular books. I've never really sold any books. Bookstores, bookstores don't really buy books through createspace because they're print on demand. They can't return them. Um, but they do. But online retail is, yes. I do sell books through online retailers and then I had, I don't know if I've ever sold a book through a library and I don't think they actually do the createspace direct stuff anymore.
[12:01] Um, so you can, but just select them if you want. It's a choice you make. I'm, I like having my books distributed through as many channels as I can. Um, but you can turn these on or off and that's the pricing. Okay. So that's how that works. So you can kind of see what you're getting. Now let's go back to my member dashboard. Let's just go look at some royalties for last month so we can see some here, but let's just go back in for a new nice report. And so you can look at your royalties by title and you can do some different sort of by channel. They also have channel in here. You can see where you're selling or lt by product of that kind of stuff. But I'm just going to do rotate by title or a new report I'm going to pay previous month.
[12:45] Okay. And just run my report and this will show that I ran. Blow this up a little bit. There we go. So I did for the month of June, I had um, 262 bucks across my 40 bucks. So they had. So I took the 262. Let's just organize these so you can see them highs to lows. So my role, regional calorie book has 92 bucks. Then they all go down. So some books, some books that a little. And you can see the royalty that I made right here, so for 92 bucks, $320 and I'm in Great Britain was 13 pounds and in Europe was three. You can see that this is generally often blank or maybe one or two. I don't sell very many books in Europe. Almost everything is done through Amazon, but I do sell books in Great Britain. So that's a channel that you want to keep going and if you can promote that.
[13:38] And then so there's the book and you can then go in and look at the details. I'll click on my details for this particular book in. You'll notice the royalty payments right here, $3, eighty two cents, some kind of fee. I don't know what it is, but in reality I don't really care. I'm really just concerned with this number. This is the list price with a book noticed. Here's one from England, $2, two pounds and nineteen cents. That's a fee that they put on there, but it doesn't really matter what these fees are. For me, it's the royalties that I'm paying attention to, but I want more money, I charge more for the book, raise it up, get more royalty, or make more books either way you want to go. So that's sort of how that kind of works. Let's go back to your dashboard. Let's go back here and you can look at that for, for any book you see them all down.
[14:32] So I hope that that sort of explains a little bit about the royalty and how that works. It's a, it seems a little confusing when you're starting out, but just have to remember that everybody has to make their cut book has to be manufactured. So this paper and ink and oppressed somewhere, some kind of press or some kind of printing device. The shipping that's involved in the book is the managing the ecommerce site and the money and all this. All this stuff. Somebody has to pay for that so everybody gets their piece and um, and we get our pizza. So in reality, I think it's pretty good compared to what you do through a publisher and you have full control over your book. And you can make nice little royalty out of it. Alright. So hope that helps. I'm Bruce Jones and uh, we will see you in the next video. All right. Bye.
Connection and Learning
Bruce Jones is the author and creator of over 40 self-published books.
If you want to learn how to create your own book visit Publishing Mastery 101 and see my courses: https://bruce-the-book-guy.usefedora.com/
Come over and join my Facebook Publishing Group, ask me questions, show your books. Great place to connect with authors and self-publishers
Join at https://www.facebook.com/groups/HowToPublishYourBook/
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| Click the Video Below to Learn about Amazon/CreateSpace Royalties |
[00:00] I Bruce Jones here and in this video I'm going to talk about book royalties. One of the questions that comes up a lot for authors who are just jumping into the self-publishing model and selling their books on Amazon is how much does it cost, how much do I have to pay to print the book, how much does Amazon take, how much are the royalties, and I get how does all that kind of work? So in this video I'm going to try to demystify a little of that and answer some of the questions that you might have about that. So we're going to primarily just focused on paperback books and this is my newest book, I Want to Publish My Book But I Don't Know How. This is a book that's created using print on demand. Print on demand is a service offered by Amazon and lots of other companies.
A customer places an order on Amazon for this book, a single order is sent to a company called Createspace. They print the book and ship it to the customer. They take their money, Amazon takes their money and you get your piece or your royalty. So how does that work and how can I figure out what my costs are going to be and all that kind of stuff. So we're using a service called Createspace. Createspace is the print on demand side of Amazon. It's where we upload our files. It's a free service to print all these books. And I'm now the author of over 40 books. So I have coloring books like this. I have music books. This is a full color one that have cords and things.
[01:30] I have children's picture books all color. Look at that. All of this color. It's great with that beautiful, beautiful book. I have all different kinds of books. And I print all of these paperbacks with Createspace. You may never have heard of it, but it's in the sort of the back office end of Amazon and it manages all of this. You can also do this through kindle and kindle hhas traditionally been the ebook publishing side of Amazon, but they're now also offering the ability to do paperback books. So a lot of this will apply to what they do too. Createspace is a free service. It's where you manage all your book accounts, upload your files. CreateSpace moves your book over to Amazon and they pay you the royalty fees, they do the whole thing. It's all done sort of behind the scenes and they also have a lot of sort of, um, services and, and tools that you can use to kind of help get you going and understand how the process works.
So I'm just starting out, I want to of understand the royalty thing so I'd go up here to books and you're ready to publish a trade paperbacks. I click on that. You get basically a page of all kinds of resources and you can learn about your cover, the interior and all of these books. To publish a book takes two pdf files, an interior file for the inside. And then the a cover file, it gets uploaded and you can learn about the sizes and things like that. All of that's right here. So it's, it's pretty good. A black and white books color, different sizes, all different sizes, all that kind of stuff. But we're going to just focus on royalties, which is what everybody wants to know about how much money am I going to make? Um, so we're going to start here.
[03:08] This is a free tool you can kind of use to kind of do some what if scenarios and then I'll take you inside to my account and show you how that really works out. But the money is, it's up on this page. And again this is under books published and trademark and we just hit royalties right there. And you get little calculator that shows you how much money you have. So when any book is published, just like any product, this is a product. So whether I was doing a pen or paper clips or magnifying glass, anything, um, there are costs involved as the manufacturing costs. Then there's a markup that goes in there usually to your distributor. So our wholesaler, and then there's also a market that goes to the retailer, so in this case Amazon is the retailer and the manufacturer is create space, but there's costs that go in all those little steps and there's also cost they're involved in just managing the ecommerce side of Amazon.
 |
| https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/ |
[04:11] So I have other ecommerce things and there's a lot of costs that go in and building the shopping cart and managing the databases and all that kind of stuff. All that costs them money. So it all hell less taken out. Createspace is a free service. In other words, we can upload our files. It doesn't cost us anything to print, but the costs are taken out of the sales price. So if we have a $10 book, um, some money is taken out and it goes to Createspace for printing, some goes to Amazon for managing in, some goes to you. So those are the royalties, the part that comes to you. That's the part we care about. Um, so let's just sort of look at this, which is a couple of little what if scenarios. So you can kind of see how this works. So you just picked the black and white.
[04:51] So any color. This is the black and white book. Everything inside here is black and white. If there's any color in here, even just one page. This is a color book is regarded as a color book. Um, and that's more expensive to print even though the whole book, maybe I'll be black and white except for that one page. It's still a color book. So if you're going to put color in your book, spread it out and put it everywhere. I'm kind of like, I did find this book, so I made my head's color and make my pictures color. So you're going to put color, use color, trim size is the size. So this particular book, let's just look at this one, eight and half by 11 and every book, that'd be different. Different costs for every book. How many pages? Whereas the size, that kind of color, black and white.
[05:32] And this book, this particular one is 96 pages. So it's just your 96, the black and white, eight and half by 1196. And for easy argument sense, we're just going to make this $10. I think I actually sell this book on Amazon for nine 95. I like that. Around that $10 mark hit calculate and this tells me the royalty. This is how much money I'm going to make. So there are two channels that marked here. There's the Amazon channel and that's this general channel right here. And then there is expanded distribution which are other channels that createspace will send your book off too. So I've seen my books on Barnes and noble books a million. There are many, many other retailers that they send the book off to him because there's another company involved. You're going to have more royalties, is more fees going to everybody gets their little piece.
[06:24] So you'll notice it's a lot less of a dollar 85. I try to have my books between 2:50 to 3:50, somewhere in there and my royalties. That's where I'm usually comfortable. And that compares to traditional publishers where the royalties are seventy cents to a dollar. So just self publishing, not counting all the other benefits we get from self publishing. You make more money if you do this, especially if you're good at marketing, you make a lot more money from the royalties from your book. But this is a very decent royalty for this book. For a book like this, I'm just the coloring book. I'm never going to compete with, you know, the three 95. I can't get the book down that low, you know, Hong Kong publishers. But for me for doing this, for not having any costs, just make a book. This is fantastic so they can see that so much and make.
[07:10] Then Amazon also sells in Europe, so there's the how much you'd make there and a Great Britain for the first one in this one down here is Europe. So that's pretty cool. The three 85 is my royalty for the book. That's what I get. That's what they pay me. Now, if I wanted to switch this around a little bit, let's just try a couple other scenarios. Let's just say this was a full color book and I'm going to leave the bleed images that it doesn't really matter what the bleed is stuff. We're just going to keep this simple. So full color, eight and a half. I let him. Let's say I had this as a color book, right? What does that do it $10. So 96 pages. My calculate your notice. I'm minus a dollar 57. I'm not charging enough. There aren't enough. There's enough money in there because color is a different printing political printing process.
[07:55] So this book is more expensive to print in color than black and white, so you can. So I need to charge more money for this book and this is where part of the decisions make when you're creating your book is how does it fit in the market? What am I, what am I competitor's pricing? Where does that fit in my too expensive? Could I change something? Can I change the size? And it changed the page count, that kind of thing to get into where I want to be. So let's just raise this up. So anyways, I remember at $10 it was three 85. So it's about, so it's 38 percent is my royalty. That's pretty cool. All right. 14, nine. Let's try that. 14 95 calculate. We're going to pretend this is a color book. I'm in the plus. I got a good dollar 40 but I'm still not unexpanded distribution.
[08:43] Expensive enough. Dollar 59. I can use a turnoff. Expanded. Just don't worry about it if I don't want to get too expensive or I raised my price stray 1995 and see what that does. And now I'm in the plus on both of them. So that was a decision I made when I did this book. This was I charged most of my books are in the $10. 14 95 range. I think I try to 24, 95 for this book. It's all color, has a lot of pages and I'm at. This is where I ran into a problem. I wanted to make sure I was making enough royalties to cover the cost of the book. So. So that's just something that's a little scenario you can kind of play with this royalty calculator member. It's under, under books, right up here, publishing a trademark and then it's on the royalties right here.
[09:32] You can kind of play their scenarios and see what you can, where does your book fit in, how much money you're going to make. And am I charging enough for the book? That's a big one in my charging it up. All right, let's go inside and I'll just show you sort of a let's go and look at some of the royalty stuff. So this is my account isn't my dashboard. This is the month of July. But let's go back to June. You can see I have four nine bookstore, but I want to go into a detailed royalty here. And actually before we do that, let me just show you inside where this is. So let's just pick a book. I'm just pick my world maps regional book and this is the Dashboard for this particular book and you'll notice right over here in the district and your distribution a column, you have channels and pricing.
[10:24] So if I go to pricing, you'll see almost the identical calculator looks like this. I can put my price in, but also tells me this number right here, the minimum list price that I can go down so I can mess around with this book down to 5:38, which is a good piece of information to know. You don't really know that. You have to kind of figure that out from the other calculator. You're like, okay, you just keep moving the number down until they go, Eh, you can't go anymore. But here they tell you what that number is. So this is how low I could make this book if I wanted to. Um, I chose nine 95. It's basically the same size as business book and I get a royalty payment of three 82 expanded is a dollar 83. So that kind of tells me where this book sits.
[11:10] If I go to my channels, remember we talked a little bit about channels and channels are aware it's going to be sold out through the default are um, are these two ones right here? Amazon.com, which is this one, and then Europe, so they also sell the books in England and then they sell them in Europe and so those are just by default where they go. So those ones were always there and then you can pick the expanded distribution if you want. Now some people just shut these off and they make it seem to make a little bit more money because I kind bouncing the things, um, with their regular books. I've never really sold any books. Bookstores, bookstores don't really buy books through createspace because they're print on demand. They can't return them. Um, but they do. But online retail is, yes. I do sell books through online retailers and then I had, I don't know if I've ever sold a book through a library and I don't think they actually do the createspace direct stuff anymore.
[12:01] Um, so you can, but just select them if you want. It's a choice you make. I'm, I like having my books distributed through as many channels as I can. Um, but you can turn these on or off and that's the pricing. Okay. So that's how that works. So you can kind of see what you're getting. Now let's go back to my member dashboard. Let's just go look at some royalties for last month so we can see some here, but let's just go back in for a new nice report. And so you can look at your royalties by title and you can do some different sort of by channel. They also have channel in here. You can see where you're selling or lt by product of that kind of stuff. But I'm just going to do rotate by title or a new report I'm going to pay previous month.
[12:45] Okay. And just run my report and this will show that I ran. Blow this up a little bit. There we go. So I did for the month of June, I had um, 262 bucks across my 40 bucks. So they had. So I took the 262. Let's just organize these so you can see them highs to lows. So my role, regional calorie book has 92 bucks. Then they all go down. So some books, some books that a little. And you can see the royalty that I made right here, so for 92 bucks, $320 and I'm in Great Britain was 13 pounds and in Europe was three. You can see that this is generally often blank or maybe one or two. I don't sell very many books in Europe. Almost everything is done through Amazon, but I do sell books in Great Britain. So that's a channel that you want to keep going and if you can promote that.
[13:38] And then so there's the book and you can then go in and look at the details. I'll click on my details for this particular book in. You'll notice the royalty payments right here, $3, eighty two cents, some kind of fee. I don't know what it is, but in reality I don't really care. I'm really just concerned with this number. This is the list price with a book noticed. Here's one from England, $2, two pounds and nineteen cents. That's a fee that they put on there, but it doesn't really matter what these fees are. For me, it's the royalties that I'm paying attention to, but I want more money, I charge more for the book, raise it up, get more royalty, or make more books either way you want to go. So that's sort of how that kind of works. Let's go back to your dashboard. Let's go back here and you can look at that for, for any book you see them all down.
[14:32] So I hope that that sort of explains a little bit about the royalty and how that works. It's a, it seems a little confusing when you're starting out, but just have to remember that everybody has to make their cut book has to be manufactured. So this paper and ink and oppressed somewhere, some kind of press or some kind of printing device. The shipping that's involved in the book is the managing the ecommerce site and the money and all this. All this stuff. Somebody has to pay for that so everybody gets their piece and um, and we get our pizza. So in reality, I think it's pretty good compared to what you do through a publisher and you have full control over your book. And you can make nice little royalty out of it. Alright. So hope that helps. I'm Bruce Jones and uh, we will see you in the next video. All right. Bye.
Connection and Learning
Bruce Jones is the author and creator of over 40 self-published books.
If you want to learn how to create your own book visit Publishing Mastery 101 and see my courses: https://bruce-the-book-guy.usefedora.com/
Come over and join my Facebook Publishing Group, ask me questions, show your books. Great place to connect with authors and self-publishers
Join at https://www.facebook.com/groups/HowToPublishYourBook/
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
How I Market and Sell Over 4,000 Books a Year on Amazon
In today's video I take you through how I market and sell over 4,300 copies of my books on Amazon a year. I take you through all the methods I use to promote and sell my books on Amazon. Including building custom websites and blogs, social media, video, email and more.
For each category of books I usually build a website or Google Blogger blog around that books topic. I then connect different social media, YouTube videos to the sites. On two of my book series, music and geography, I also set up an email capture box using AWeber.com with a lead magnet of additional content. Once some signs up I send out additional book content along with a book catalog sheet so people can buy.
Come over and join my publishing Facebook group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/HowToPublishYourBook/
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| My Book Marketing Wheel for Selling Books |
Sunday, July 3, 2016
The Importantance of Building Effective Descriptive Copy for YouTube and Amazon
Question: I was asked a question about a comment I made about putting
lots of words in your YouTube video description, what did that mean? I
thought I would share the answer here
Answer: So video like on YouTube or books on Amazon are found by search, people go to the search box and search for stuff, Also they go to Google and search for stuff. Google and the other search engines use words to find stuff.
I am including Amazon in this answer because the same thing applies there also
Answer: So video like on YouTube or books on Amazon are found by search, people go to the search box and search for stuff, Also they go to Google and search for stuff. Google and the other search engines use words to find stuff.
I am including Amazon in this answer because the same thing applies there also
YouTube and Amazon have description boxes that you can put your video
or book description into. On Youtube you can also put live weblinks in,
this is a live weblink, http://www.brucethebookguy.com This is not brucethebookguy.com. Note the http:// at the front
Even though the site may figure out that the link is actually a link and treat it like that. This is important because you can send people to your website from YouTube if you do this.
On YouTube you can have up to 5000 characters in your description, the more words the better. YouTube can figure out what your video is all about based on these descriptions and then they can catalog the video correctly, just like Amazon can figure out what your book is about from the description. The goal is make your videos very easy to find from the search boxes.
You are working two audiences, Audience 1, your viewer who might read the description and learn about your video and you and Audience 2, the search engine, Google or YouTube or Amazon who needs to feed the video or book to the viewer. They need to know what the book is about so they can deliver it to the correct audience.
The key here is to have good descriptive descriptions. Correct keywords. Live http web links to all your social media sites, Lots of good descriptive text. For a video you can also put in the transcript of the video, that helps a lot, for a book put in the chapter titles. What you will discover is that most people don't do this, including very big companies that should know better. Especially on videos, they just throw in one or two sentences without any live links. Use the power of the search engines to your advantage. They are giving you the tools, you just have to use them.
The order of it for YouTube, live http:// web link first thing, then a short descriptive sentence, then a longer, flushed out description, then drop in all your social media links or repeat the top link. Test your links. This will help hugely in getting your videos ranked in search.
Even though the site may figure out that the link is actually a link and treat it like that. This is important because you can send people to your website from YouTube if you do this.
On YouTube you can have up to 5000 characters in your description, the more words the better. YouTube can figure out what your video is all about based on these descriptions and then they can catalog the video correctly, just like Amazon can figure out what your book is about from the description. The goal is make your videos very easy to find from the search boxes.
You are working two audiences, Audience 1, your viewer who might read the description and learn about your video and you and Audience 2, the search engine, Google or YouTube or Amazon who needs to feed the video or book to the viewer. They need to know what the book is about so they can deliver it to the correct audience.
The key here is to have good descriptive descriptions. Correct keywords. Live http web links to all your social media sites, Lots of good descriptive text. For a video you can also put in the transcript of the video, that helps a lot, for a book put in the chapter titles. What you will discover is that most people don't do this, including very big companies that should know better. Especially on videos, they just throw in one or two sentences without any live links. Use the power of the search engines to your advantage. They are giving you the tools, you just have to use them.
The order of it for YouTube, live http:// web link first thing, then a short descriptive sentence, then a longer, flushed out description, then drop in all your social media links or repeat the top link. Test your links. This will help hugely in getting your videos ranked in search.
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing Hits #1 International Best Seller Status
What a great day Tuesday was, a huge thank you to everyone who helped me launch my new Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing book. During the day it became an international best selling as sales came in over night hitting #1 in the US, Australia and Canada on Wednesday and a best seller in the UK and Germany. Thank you everyone.
For the launch I actually used my own book to help me with the plan, using the Level 1 and 2 engagement levels. Some of the things I did were to post the launch announcement in all of my FaceBook groups, made a Youtube book trailer, set up a Pinterest board, updated my Linkedin account, and put an announcement here on the blog. I also pulled all my different email lists together and sent an announcement out.
Most of the sales were on the Kindle side. Usually when you are doing a book launch you are working with just the Kindle ebooks because you can reduce the price to just $.99. I will keep that price for a few more days and then start raising it. I ended up selling a total of 79 books on launch day with 71 in the US, 5 in Australia and 2 in the UK and 1 in Canada. Today I picked up some additional sales in Canada and went to #1 there also. What really pushed me over the top was coming back around midnight and re-posting in all the groups. I also had some great help from a colleague who kept pushing me to keep selling and helped with some of the book categories.
To Buy a Copy, Please Click Below
Print: Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing with Complete Action Plan
Kindle: Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing with Complete Action Plan
Saturday, March 5, 2016
10 Tips for Selling Your Book on Amazon Successfully
Amazon.com is most likely where you will be selling your book. This site is also one of the best book and product research tools ever invented. They can tell you tons of information about your market, your readers, what they like and don’t like if you spend some time checking it out. By using what you learn you can adjust your book to key into your readers wants and needs. Marketing isn’t just pushing out lots of info about your book it is also making sure your book answers the key problems that your market has.
Make Your Book Work on the Amazon Sales Page
___A good cover that is easy to read as a thumbnail, remember we see most of our books now as thumbnail images from Amazon searches. Can readers figure out what your book is about when it is 1.5 inches high.
___Having a good title and subtitle, is it descriptive and works with search.
___A good healthy book description. Incorporate your categories, keywords and the main points about your book into the description. Drop in your Table of Contents. Many authors don’t do this. Remember books are found with search, can yours be found.
___Publish both Kindle and CreateSpace paperback versions. If you have time produce an audio version. Give your readers your book in every format.
___Link your website with a book cover thumbnail image to your Amazon sales page, make it an affiliate link. At the bottom of the Amazon sales page you will see the signup link for being an affiliate
___Use the social media links from the Amazon sales page, they are usually over on the right
___E-mail Amazon with your book categories for the international Amazon sites.
___Set up your Amazon affiliate account, use this link for your website and any posts about your book. Gives you a little extra juice.
___Use the Amazon social medial affiliate Facebook and Twitter links. Post regularly.
___Ask for book reviews. Book reviews are a big part of having success on Amazon and Amazon looks for them
This text is an excerpt from my latest book Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing, Complete Book Launch Action Plan Included! by J. Bruce Jones Available at Amazon.com, now available in Kindle and Print
J. Bruce Jones is the author and creator of over 40 books. I create books and I help others get their books published through my consulting and training programs. Check out my course page for more info on my training courses.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
20 Lessons I Learned on Book Marketing from Publishing Over 40 Books, Part 2
Over the years of creating and publishing over 40 different books I have learned quite a lot. Below is a list of some of the main lessons. So lets get started with some general concepts and ideas about book marketing. In future posts I will be digging deeper into many of these
This list is an excerpt from my latest book Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing, Complete Book Launch Action Plan Included! by J. Bruce Jones Available at Amazon.com
- Your book marketing begins the day you start writing your book. We often don’t even know we are starting a book project, but we need to start building out our author platform as soon as you can. Your author platform are all the ways that your readers and fans are connected to you. We will be talking more about this shortly.
- Amazon doesn’t do your online marketing for you. You have to market your book.
- It is important to build some kind of central web home for your book, this can be a website or a blog. Facebook and Twitter are not homes for your book. You want to have a place online that you can blog from, host content, collect email names, have your bio and your book description and info, and have connections so readers can buy.
- Build a web site around your own content and sponsor your site with your own books.
- Build your author platform!
- Build out your marketing wheel. Have a central home where all your social media and other properties can point to. From this home have a clear path for buying your book.
- Give Away to Get. Give away sample chapters, maybe even full books, related content, and information. Deliver however your reader wants. Fans need to touch and feel your content.
- Web Traffic Matters, only about 1% of visitors will buy, but you need to bring in the other 99% to get those one. Be out there, be public and bring in readers.
- Build a mixture of online and off-line marketing.
- Book marketing is a continual process, do something everyday.
- Publishing on Amazon is important, start here first then branch out.
- Amazon book reviews are important, ask your readers to add a book review to your book.
- Have the best cover you can afford,
- Edit, Copy Edit and Proof Read, pay an editor to clean up your book. It is one of the most important things you can do.
- Good healthy book descriptions are important, use all the space they give you. Books are found by words in Google and Amazon search but only if the words are there to be found.
- Your Table of Contents are your book’s benefits, don’t do Chapter 1, Chapter 2, be descriptive in your list of chapters.
- Try not to end up with a garage full of books, use print-on-demand and e-books. Keep your costs to a minimum. You can always print later.
- If you think you are going to be selling your book in stores be sure to buy your own ISBN number, also look at IngramSpark.com instead of CreateSpace.
- Create an event around the release of your book. Build some buzz about it using all of the tools available.
- You don’t need to advertise in traditional media to have a successful book
This list is an excerpt from my latest book Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing, Complete Book Launch Action Plan Included! by J. Bruce Jones Available at Amazon.com
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Learn How to Market Your Book Course is Now Free for Everyone
Hi All, just want to make a special announcement that I am releasing my How to Market Your Book course to the world for free. It is now available for anyone who signs up to my How to Publish Your Book School. For the past two years I have sold over 3,600 books each year. Learn my steps, all you have to do just sign up and you can get access to all my secrets for marketing books.
What you get in the Free course
I am also offering my two free pdf books, the Action Plan and the Checklist
Book Marketing Checklist, I break it down to steps for each of the different tasks.
Book Marketing Action Plan, this document gives you an outline for 3 different levels that you can work at for marketing your book. They go from simple and free to a full on book launch.
To access the free course click this link or sign up over on the right in the signup box
http://bruce-the-book-guy.usefedora.com/courses/how-to-market-your-book
What you get in the Free course
- General book marketing concepts, my main lessons
- Ideally book marketing begins the day we start writing our books. This video covers stuff to do before you release your book
- Amazon marketing, learn to use the most powerful store in the world to promote your boo
- Preparing for your book launch, getting your fans, platform and the market ready.
- Everyone is trying to get an Amazon category best seller, Video 5 covers how
- When you get right into marketing having a media kit becomes very useful. This video walks you through what you need.
- Your book is launched and on its way but the marketing doesn’t really ever stop. In Video 7 I talk about what you can do on an ongoing basis
- And finally we cover off-line marketing. Not everything is the web, this video covers things you can outside of the web.
- I also cover how to set up an author/book blog/web site. This is key for giving you and your book a home base to focus your marketing on.
I am also offering my two free pdf books, the Action Plan and the Checklist
Book Marketing Checklist, I break it down to steps for each of the different tasks.
Book Marketing Action Plan, this document gives you an outline for 3 different levels that you can work at for marketing your book. They go from simple and free to a full on book launch.
To access the free course click this link or sign up over on the right in the signup box
http://bruce-the-book-guy.usefedora.com/courses/how-to-market-your-book
Friday, November 20, 2015
Learn How to Print, Sell, and Distribute Your Book with IngramSpark, Interview with J. Bruce Jones
This week I had a great interview with Robin Cutler of IngramSpark.com on Learning How to Print, Sell, and Distribute Your Print-on-Demand Book with IngramSpark, We learned all the ins and out of how to bring our books out to the retail and library markets. Ingram is the worlds largest book distributor and and has one of the biggest print on demand operations. Combining both lets you print as you need and distribute anywhere in the world using their 39,000 partners.
Topics covered in the interview:
1:44 General into, IngramSpark combines print on demand printer LightingSource and the distribution company Ingram, now the world largest global book distributor
3:20 How a new person starts working with IngramSpark
4:00 setting up your account, uploading files, metadata, formats. Paperback, hardcover, saddle, including books with jackets
6:50 Can't do spiral, perf or horizontal books yet but working on them
8:30 we talk about ISBN numbers, from IngramSpark $85, they can work with Amazon also
12:00 learning about the IngramSparks book catalog iPage, goes out to 39,000 retail and library partners, this is big also, stores can order your book
Standard trade discount is 55% but you can set the discount from 30-50%
15:00 Cost is $49 to set up a book, one time fee, for either print or ebook
17:45 Print & ebook, they also distribute to Kindle, Apple iBook, Nook and Kobe and an additional 60 other ereaders
help with uploading for both ebooks and print, will also convert print to ebook for $.60/page.
22:20 Ingram has a global reach with PDF printing and distribution, also have partners around the world
Print in UK for Europe and Melbourne for Australia
23:00 Global Connect program, now includes China
We talked about putting a store on your site, collect orders and IngramSparks ships. You can also set up bundles of your books, send in the order and they will ship, Publisher Direct Program
27:00 we talked about a question on a magazine distributor who want to distribute their books in Europe and Africa, if this is also you check with the International Sales Team
28:45 Meta Data, introduction to keyword, reviews and google search
31.50 Converting yourself from a writer to a publisher
32:00 Ingram moves books to Amazon, also the importance of fostering the relationship with our book seller, be a customer of the book store and the library
To learn more about IngramSpark visit http://www.ingramspark.com
Be sure to sign-up over on the right for our free Book Marketing Checklist and Actions plans
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