Showing posts with label Selling Your Book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Selling Your Book. Show all posts

Friday, November 13, 2020

Amazon Book Sales, March 2010-October 2020


 Total e-books sold..................................................3,120

Total paperbacks sold............................................31,485

Total books sold....................................................34,605


Average e-book sales price.........................$2.50/$7,800

Average paperback book sales price.....$10.00/$314,850


Total Gross Sales on Amazon, (estimate).........$322,650

Total Royalties Paid (my profit)..............$108,126


Average sales over 10 years........................$10,812/year

Average royalty per book........................................$3.12


I look at book sales from the royalty per book point of view. That is the money I put in my pocket. 

I also sell books in PDF format on several websites. I use Gumroad.com to take the orders and deliver the files. I primarily sell my geography coloring books, which have a sales price of $5.00/book. I also bundle them which pushes the unit price up to and makes the average price $7.12/book-bundle. This is a new direction for me and with the geography books and other titles, I have sold 457 books for $2,739. 

I encourage you to look at all avenues for selling your books. Along with Gumroad.com I also use Etsy.com. We are a global world and with PDF you can sell and deliver your book anywhere and everywhere you have customers. It costs almost nothing to test and try.

Remember my principal, what can I do to have sales, try everything? It is a big planet with billions of customers and we are all connected.


Excerpt from How to Sell Your Book, How I Made $322,650 and Sold 34,605 Books On Amazon by J. Bruce Jones

J. Bruce Jones is an author and creator of over 50 books. Bruce teaches self-publishing authors how to publish their books. To learn more about Bruce’s latest project, How to Sell Your Book, How I Made $322,650 and Sold 34,605 Books on Amazon click here.


Friday, June 26, 2020

Over $322,650 in Book Sales on Amazon



I was looking at my Amazon historical sales today and in lifetime commissions I just went over $100K to $101,743.87, I average about $10/book. So in retail sales, I have sold $322,650 dollars in books based on selling 34,605 books. Hard to believe. It looks like they are keeping records for me back to Jan 2011. The above and below charts are from 2011-2020.


Saturday, December 8, 2018

Creating Your Own Journal Empire



Creating Your Own Journal Empire

A friend of mine. Rebecca Holman, recently hit an amazing goal. Her goal was to create 2,000 journals. She succeeded this fall with 2,001 journals and low content books on Amazon. Low content books are journals, coloring books, template books, planners, blank comic books that you can use to create your own stories.

Out of this effort she created a course called Journal Tsunami 2.0 about how to do it. The course covers how to Research Your Market, Create Books Quickly, Uploading them to Amazon and then Do it Again. The course is fill with Templates, training, layouts, images and more.

Journal Tsunami 2.0 Course Covers

  • Looking at the Low Content Market
  • The opportunity and how to get started
  • What makes the books so awesome
  • The tools to use
  • Watch as she creates a 190 page book in under 10 minutes
  • Creating covers


To learn more about Rebecca's Journal Tsunami 2.0 course Click Here (Affiliate Link).

Friday, November 2, 2018

Marketing Your Book Using Simple Book Trailer Videos




Book Trailer Video Marketing Basics, Use Video to Promote Your Book from Bruce Jones on Vimeo.

Hi, I am Bruce Jones and this article is on marketing your book with video marketing, so one of the questions I see floating around in a couple of the publishing groups I am in, was how to get started marketing your book using video and somebody was talking about it was just too complicated. There were too many things to do. So what I want to do is just show you in this video how quickly how you can make a simple book trailer video and then get your video marketing going. So this is real bare bones, bottom level, but we'll just create the book trailer video and put it in the different places and show you what you can do. Videos are great if you're sort of launching your book. I'm going to use this book. There's one of my older books. This was probably. Oh I don't know. How old is this book? This book goes back to 2011. So this is probably old book and you can always put a video out about your books and sort of re promote it. 

Re-energize it. Alright, so what I'm going to do is just go into my Mac. I'm on a Mac and built into the Mac or you can use your phone or whatever you want to do. I'm just going to bring up one of the applications Photo Booth. Photo Booth makes the video super quick and easy and just looks like this. 

I want three things in my video. 

1. I want to say what I've got. So this is my book. 

2. What we'll will do, I'm just gonna talk a little bit about the insides, the benefits

3. what I want you to do. That's the call to action. What's next? 

So you want to tell people where to go or what to do, how to get it. So let's go. We'll just make a quick video. 

We'll load it up on Youtube and then just show you how to get going with video marketing. Alright. So we're just going to. This Photo Booth, if you have a Mac you will find it in the Applications folder. We're just making that quick picture to. This is a great way to make a quick promo shot. Like that, you have a picture just like that. If you don't like it, then do it over and over again the way you want. All right, the bottom here, you'll see a picture and you can also do all kinds of cool special effects to. This is the video one. So I'm just gonna Click on video number one. I've got what, uh, what it will do and what I want you to do next. 


Making the Video

Hi Bruce Jones here, and I'm just talking today about my World Regional Maps Coloring Book. This is one of my favorite books, it is a bestselling books and it's a book of maps that you can color. It has all the different regions of the world including the Middle East, the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, the continents of Antarctica and Arctic and all around. The book is set up with maps that are easy to color. You can photocopy them. They have names, city names in every map. Also has outline maps, so you have all the different versions all built into one book. Check it out, it's available at Amazon and the link will be somewhere around here. All right, see you next time. Bye. Bye. 





That's it. All right. Pretty simple. Pretty, pretty simple and that no editing. Just going to pull it off right here and I just talked to say about by world. There it is. Save the file to your desktop. Give your video a good name. That's especially an important for Youtube. The names are searchable. Pull that off of there. 

Here we go. World regional map coloring book. Okay, video is done. Let's go to YouTube. I'm going to bring up YouTube. You have a YouTube account, if you have a Gmail account. I'm just going to go right up here where it says create a video or post upload a video and we just have to drag the video to there and it's going to upload. Now for the description, this book is already published, but I can use my book description from Amazon, but I'm just going to go over here. 

While that's uploading, I'm just going to grab the description right here off of my Amazon book page. Here it is. I'm dropping it in here. This is. This is how fast can I put a video up and then I'm going to take this link. This Is the link for the book right there and we're just going to say check out the book at Amazon and just put the link below it. That's it. World Regional Map Coloring Book available on Amazon, right? That's pretty cool. Oh, some tags will do. World regional maps. World maps, a regional and rural regional. See Us maps, maps, Africa maps. 

You can always come back and add more keywords, better description etc. Your Color mapped coloring book. Cool, right. That's good enough for the moment. And uh, we'll let that be. We're going to hit publish, pressing this button and it is done. It published. Looks like everything is good. 


On to Video Marketing

There it is. Okay, so now we have published the video. I'm just going to remember this link right here and now we're going to do the video marketing. So this is how simple this can be done. All right, so I'm just going to go to facebook. So let me go show you the map or the videos. So here it is on Youtube. And right over here there's a share button. So now the object is to just spread it around to the world and then also use it. So if you have a blog, you can put this on your book page or a website. This is just the little promo video that goes on it. We have a Facebook page, you put it there, put on Pinterest, put it on Twitter. 

So let's just do that. Let's just spread it around. So I'm just going to go to share and use of all these here. These little share buttons that you can go in and you probably are already members of all these places. You have a YouTube address here and you also have an embed code if you're going into a blog, depending how it's gonna work. So we're just going to use, we're just going to do sort of the basic stuff, so let's just go and put it up on twitter. So we'll just go to twitter. Log in. 

It's been posted. I didn't do anything, so that was pretty easy. I should have put a little message in there. Um, let's do it again. So I'm going to do the coloring. All color, all the world. Okay. We're on Twitter. I have a Pinterest board or Pinterest site, so we'd go to Pinterest. And so here we are on Pinterest. Just pick what board. I'm have a bunch of boards. You can go figure out how to do that, but Pinterest gets a huge amount of traffic. I almost get more traffic on Pinterest than I do on some of my sites. Let's just put this in. Oh, we'll put it in here. We can edit this a little bit. World regional maps coloring book available on Amazon called the world. You can spend more time making it better words, but it's fine for the moment. It's good. Put it in here. Done Pinterest. Look at that. We're just spreading it around. Let's come back. Facebook. All right, so we can post automatically to Facebook or I can take this link. Someone do that. Take this link right here. I'm going to go to facebook and I had my how to publish your book facebook group. So we're just going to go there and uh, working on, uh, how to use video marketing for your bucks. Sample sample book, trailer, trailer, video, post that. It'll grab the link. 

There it is. The goal here is create a simple video. YouTube has have all of these different share buttons on what it is. So there's lots here to choose from. But the goal here is create a simple video however you do it. Your phone is perfect. That little Photo Booth that's built into our iMac is perfect. Whatever you have, just create a simple video. What I've got, what it will do, and what do you want me to do next? Just talk about your book, show the pages. I made a 40 second video, but it could certainly be longer, should be longer, and then spread it to all the places that you have your blog or website, your Facebook group, your Twitter, all that kind of stuff, and you can do this over and over again. Today isn't just a one time thing. You can go to the share button everyday and post something. You could send different messages, you can put it different places. And these little links can go in lots of places. All right, hope that helps. I'm Bruce Jones and uh, get going with your book trailer video. Alright, bye. Bye

Come over and learn more at PublishingMastery101.com

Thursday, July 19, 2018

The Self-Publishing Manual Pre-Release PDF Copy

The Self-Publishing Manual, Pre-Publishing Release


"I want to publish my book but I don't know how to do it, please help me." 

In my How to Publish Your Book Facebook Group I get some version of this question more than any other. Usually the book is written and that is as far as the author has gotten. The question is where do I start? What do I do? How do I publish my book? I have just published, now what do I do? These are really big and often confusing questions. So, let’s dive in and see if I can give you some direction and the basic overview of how you can publish your book.
The Self-Publishing Manual, Create and Publish Your Own Print or e-Book, is an updated and revise version of my previous how to publish your book publication. So much has change in the past few months. CreateSpace, which was our go to site for publishing and selling paperback books on Amazon, has been merged into KDP.Amazon. This is a total rewrite, all updated for using KDP/Amazon/Kindle. Lots of new marketing info, more in-depth e-book. This version is the pre-publication version. All the updates are in and I am doing the final edits.

Part 1. Key Publishing Questions. Part 1 takes you through many of the basic questions that people ask about publishing their book. I talk about where to publish, what is print-on-demand, what is an ISBN number, KDP.Amazon, Kindle and how does copyright work.

Part 2. Writing, Creating and Publishing Your Book. Part 2 is an overview of the creating and publishing process. I have broken it down into 12 steps. We start with creating the content. Then print or e-book, what is involved and how do you do it, interior and cover. We move to publishing your book, how and where it is done and then one of my favorite topics, re-purposing your content for additional revenue. Includes the Self-Publishing Checklist.

Part 3. The Bonus Section. In the bonus section I cover four topics; how to launch your book as an Amazon best seller with a Best Seller Check List, expanded with more tips and ideas. How to create a book quickly using my Top Ten Technique and we wrap-up with a resource list.

Part 1. Key Questions to Ask Before You Begin
• Where Are You in The Process? Are You Just Starting Out or is the Book Complete?
• What Kind of Book Are You Creating, Novel, How To, Children’s, Picture, Coloring, 
Poetry, Business, Cookbook?
• Is Your Book Going to Be Paperback, Hardcover, E-Book or All the Above?
• Which Do I Do, Self-Publish or Traditional Publish My Book?
• Where Do I Publish My Book?
• Self-Publishing Sites Comparison Chart
• What is Print-on-Demand Printing?
• What is KDP.Amazon/Kindle Print?
• Why Does Kindle/Amazon want My Tax and Bank Account Info?
• What is an e-Pub?
• What Programs Should I Use to Create My Book?
• What Programs Should I use to Create a Picture/Children’s Book?
• Can I Create a Hardcover Book?
• Can My Book Be in Bookstores?
• How Do I Get My Book in Bookstores?
• How Do I Make an Audio Book?
• Are You Publishing Primarily in the US or Worldwide?
• How Long Should My Book Be? 
• What is an ISBN Number?
• Do I Need to Copyright My Book?
• Who Owns the Book’s Copyright if I Publish on Amazon, Kindle/Amazon or Me?

• How Do Royalties Work?

My Story, Learning to Write at 53

Part 2. How to Write and Publish Your Book

Writing the Book
1. Writing Your Book
2. Collect Your Graphic Assets, Images, Pictures, and Charts
3. Key Elements that Every Book Should Have
4. Editing Your Book
5. Pre-Edit Printed Proof
6. Six Different Options for Publishing Your Book.

Creating the Book
7. Creating a Kindle e-book, Including a Kindle Formatting Guide
8. Creating a KDP.Amazon/Kindle Print Book, Inside and Cover
9. Creating a Quick Print Book Publishing Your Book
10. Uploading and Publishing Your Book
11. Launching and Marketing Your Book

Re-Purposing Your Book’s Content
12. Re-purposing Your Book Content for Additional Products

Self-Publishing Checklist

Part 3. Bonus Content
• Making an Amazon Best Seller
• Best Seller Checklist
• Top Ten Technique for Creating a Book

• Publishing Resources

Pick up a Pre-Release copy of the book, Click Here

Buy the Book

Monday, July 9, 2018

How to Market and Sell Your Book Using Your Book's Content

How to Market and Sell Your Book Using Your Book's Content

Watch the Video Below to Learn How to Use Your Book Content to Promote your Book


Hi, Bruce Jones here, from the how to publish your book Facebook Group and BruceTheBookGuy.com, a blog. I am a a self published author, with over 40 books. Here's just some of them, big pile of them here, have lots of different kinds of books and we had a great question that came up on the facebook group from a member a on how to publish a book facebook group and encourage you to come on over there and join if you're seeing this video somewhere else, just search on how to publish your book facebook group or check out the details. Anyways, the comment was about on book marketing and it was about the author was starting to do a book and just wanting to give away sketches from her coloring book and um, and then some opened up a dialogue about how is this a good idea given what your content spreading the content around everybody is very protective of their content and all that kind of stuff.


So I just, in this video I wanted to show you what I do is one of the techniques I use in marketing my books of how I take my content and spread it around all over the planet and as many places as they can and uh, how I think it has been a very effective tool for marketing my books. Let me bring up my, um, bring up the website here. So this is the how to publish a book facebook group and I encourage, you know, come on over and join his great dialogue. We have a 3,500 people now and it's kind of fun. So I'm also going to highlight, um, to one of our members. Linda does zeal, I think I can never quite got to make sure I publish her. Her name right. Does the. Oh, maybe hope that's right. Um, and been very generous.

She has been doing some things that go along with this and I want to just show this also. It's not just me that's doing this and it's a very effective technique and just show you what you can do using some of the tools. So we're going to bounce around between some facebook stuff, blog stuff, um, some website stuff and just show you kind of things I do to promote and market my stuff. So what I mean by this is taking the content from your books. So let's just take one of my books. So we'll use this one. Mandela happiness. So it's just a coloring book. And what I do is I take the content from this and I release it out into the world, uh, image my image page by page, paragraph by paragraph, and then around my content, I rap, I'm ads from my own content, so I use my content, bring people to a site, and then around my content I put my own books with links to Amazon.

So just, just start a quick example. I'll just show you, this is a blog and I, and I am lax on getting back and I have too many of these things to keep them, keep up with them all. But the concept is all here. So this is the Mandela happiness coloring books. We did a series of these books. I think I did four of them. Um, and then I built a blog, this is google blogger where I took the content, put it into the blog and then put ads. So as this is, and this is free because this is a google blogger account and you can do this with free accounts. You don't have to spend any money doing this. Um, so I just post stuff about the book. I did different things, show the book being colored, you know, uh, the book launch. We had a cookout and did the, did the book launch at a cookout.

I'm just content from the book. And then around the book I added ads, if you click on them, take you to Amazon so you can buy. So the blog, the purpose of the blog is to bring people to interested people to a central location. So in this case, the Mandela happiness blog, and it brings people in here and they can see it. And then you have ads for your book. You can also set up individual pages, which I did with videos. So however you're going to do it, I believe in releasing as much of the content as you can. I'm going to show you in a second some of that stuff that I've done. Um, let's go to another one. So I did, I've done a lot of different kinds of books and one of my books is essential chords for guitar, Ukulele, a guitar and Mandolin, Ukulele and Banjo.

Use your content to bring Google visitors and then wrap ads around the edges and link to Amazon


So I just did basically I did a book that documented my learning these instruments and I did, they're just a beginner cord book and it has been selling for years. I did this, oh, I don't know, years ago. And it just keeps selling and selling and selling on Amazon. I think I did. It was the copyright on this, um, 2011. So I've been selling this book for Eighteen, seven years. So I set up a site called Acoustic Music TV.com where I took the pages I just made from the pdf file. It just took a jpeg of the page because you already had the file. Me and I set up an individual page for each book. Now web design has moved on to be very fancy and different and very different. Look, I've never changed this design since. I put it up probably back in 2012 is when I put this site up.

It's a very simple website. I learned how to do it off of Youtube. Just looking at. I didn't Dreamweaver. I'm. I'm using Hostgator is the host so accustomed me about, I don't know, $8 a month or something to host these sites and I'm gonna show you a couple of them and a very primitive but it works with very effectively. And if I just go to any page in here, I'm just going to here. You can see where I took the graphic, the page from the book. I added a little book thing at the bottom so somebody downloads this to get this chord chart. Along comes a little ad for my book, some description and then around my book I added copies, thumbnails of the book that are linked straight to Amazon. So this book has been up there a long time. I'm just going to take her.

I don't even still number 76 in Mendelssohn's and 99 and Banjo. So this book is still in 116 and made it so it's still selling for eight, nine years. This book has been up there, but it's a very simple technique to do. You can just take, especially if you have graphics, take the PDF, make an individual a jpeg. I just set up a simple website. You can do this on Wix, you can do this on a weebly, could do it any, anything you do in the blog, it doesn't really matter. Um, and then you just wrap ads, run it. I also usually will put up some kind of book selling page like so. All right. And that model it on Amazon where you have book cover author, that little video sample pages from the book links. She always want to link it. So you want to bring people to a site because they're interested in the content you have in your book and give them a clear path to Amazon just like Amazon does.

I added some related books in here so that they just stumbled on this page. Maybe they want to do something else. Um, I've done repurpose this into posters, all kinds of stuff, but this is just a technique of taking your content, put it online and um, that the world find it. It just sits here. It's simple. It's like a big advertising platform and, um, brings people to. Yup, there you go. It brings people in. Let's go and look at what Linda did. I really liked what she did. Part of what all this is about. So this is kind of a passive marketing approach. It doesn't, I don't, I'm not interacting with these clients even though I do have an email list on here and a signup for downloading a pdf with some free pages on it. Um, I do very, very little on this site.

It just sort of sits here kind of grinding away funneling people up to Amazon to find my book so that you have to sort of recreate the bookstore online that you have in reality. Let's go look at what Linda did. So Linda is an illustrator. She's written a number of books on different topics and um, they're really good. She went on horses and she did take a couple of years ago where she blogged all about the writing of the book and now she's doing it on facebook and the advantage of facebook is you're building a community that you can continually keep in contact with, so if you go to her adventures, a turbo, which is her newest book, she's basically taking you through the journey and the, the, the, the, the path of creating this book. She has videos in here showing you how she makes the illustration.

So let's just go in here for a second and look at this and I checked the Linda beforehand, so she's cool with me showing you all this, but I, but I, I really commend her producing this. She just, you just kind of continually photograph. We have phones, click, click, push it up. You know, it's not hard. You notice the tools. She's using the drawing, she's using the storyboard she's using and she's building a community of people that she can use to sell this book. When she gets to that point, look at that. See she's laid that out and get this. This is fantastic. Look at this great thing. Here's you just sort of working out the book, but she's letting you come along with it. She's taking the potential customer, the reader of this book along on a journey. So this is a great thing.

How she got it. Look at that and see she's, I mean, this is just really, really great stuff. Anybody can do this with your books. This doesn't have to be a picture book. You look at that. Everybody loves to see behind the scene studio shot. Um, what a great shot at a great, great, great picture. Look at that so you can see how this is developing. You're getting astic about her book, you can comment about a book, you can do things in and then when it comes time to sell, you can launch your book through this page. So I really think this is a fantastic model which he's doing with colors, with paper. Look at the book dummy here stuff going back to the beginning of this. And then she promoted this on different, other different groups. Like she's in the how to publish a book facebook group.

So she promoted there and bring people over. So all that is cool. Look at this. This is just the thumbnails. Lay out your storyboard for your books. This is just great. Great, great stuff. Let me show a couple of others that I've done. So I've done the music one. I've done the blog one, I've done. Um, I have some antique maps that I sell. I do the same thing. I promote different versions of things. And so notice here are just maps that people can buy. They can use them in their books, they can use them in their graphic design packaging that websites. I show every single map that I have in this collection. And then I give a clear link right here. And if you just click on this, it should go. Yep. There it goes. It goes right to the, to the patient with the video so that you can buy it.

So you're giving people, you're, you're highlighting what you have, you give them, you. So you used that to bring people interested, people searching you, Google indexes. This stuff had come. They come to your site to see what you have. Then you give them a clear path. I tend to work with my numbers. I think one percent, you're really working with one person. One percent isn't any different than direct mail and postcards and all that kind of stuff. Um, it's a very open, maybe one percent of the people who come here buy this so you can look at your numbers and you can tell very quickly how many orders you might get by what your traffic and what can you do to increase the traffic. How do you build more? Here's another site that I have called free us and world maps. So I had developed, I still do sell a large line of click art naps and used in presentations, business presentations, a homeschooling, all kinds of stuff.

And I, there were an illustrator and powerpoint, but I also put them into books like so and I took graphics all these maps and put them on a website. This website gets about 30 to 50,000 visitors a month. And let me just go to something like Mexico here. So I have ads in here for other products as in here for my books, ads in here for different kinds of things because all these people are coming to sight see it. So you can take your content and do that and bring people into your collections by just releasing the content. I also have you noticed in here every page I cross promote, I'm not worried about design on this so much. This was again done a long time ago and I'm kind of a gradually here and there. I update it. It isn't about the design, it isn't about fancy.

I want it to be as much stuff as open as possible, as easy for Google to use. Um, and then I can sell my books here and that'll bring people and they'll figure it out. I need to replace that video. But again, look at members and we did the music. We had the same model, we put some samples, links of other books, page directory, and this lets people know what I'm selling and they can bring it up because his work with text, I believe it does seem to be the last example, just show you this. So I had done my latest book was I want to publish my book but don't know how it's my manual on self publishing takes you through all the steps of what you need to do and on my Brucethebookguy.com site, which is just sort of all the things that I'm not bitter potentially publish everything on my facebook group, so I put it up over here, a little longer format I where I write a blog post and do things, but what I did is I took text from the book and I put here is basically have 12 steps in here and how to write a book.

You'll notice it's all right here, right? Google indexes this, it brings people over to it. I have videos, I put links, I put all kinds of stuff, and you'll notice over here on this side is a link for the book and you can go right to it. So pretty, pretty cool. Now is this, why is this work? I worked because one, because Google sees good content and brings people there because the answers questions, but also if I go into the stats and it makes sure you had some competitive statistics. Our stats package on your site, I'm using the one that's in blogger. It's like a simplified version of google analytics, but if I go inside and look at stats, and this is just sort of the stats of today. I had 54 people here. You can see this, a lot of traffic. A few days ago, something going on.

I go here, you'll notice, so here are the posts that was popular posts over the last week and here the most popular pages over the last week and you'll notice the page on from this book is the number one page. Generally it's my page and I highly recommend on any site you do like this to have a resources page of links for all kinds of stuff that is generally usually the most popular me look at my month. Yeah, resources is number one, but the texts from this book is number two is bringing people in and then how I sell books, so this text is working to bring people to the site. If people like what they see and they see the link, they go to Amazon and they can get it. So I love this technique of take your content, whether it's images or texts or you're in development. Some people write their books on their blogs, some people do like Linda's doing.

She's showing you the entire process as you go and you're taking people on a drink. People love to see the behind the scenes, see what you're doing, see how you created it and put it all up. So I hope that's helpful. Um, ask questions, have a dialogue, post comments, whatever you want to do is great. Come over to the how to publish a book facebook group. Um, make sure you sign up for that or come over to [inaudible] dot com and read my stuff and would have happened by my books. You know, they're out there all over the place and that's all right. We'll see you in the next video. Great. Bye. 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/

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Can I Sell My CreateSpace Books at Local Stores in Our Town


Question from the How to Publish Your Book Facebook Group:

Enjoyed your live session just now. I think someone has asked this before but...if I publish through Create Space, can I sell my books at local stores in our small town?

Answer: Most stores won't order books from Createspace because they can't be returned, but there is nothing stopping you from doing it and selling them to the stores yourself. I agree with getting your own ISBN, but in reality if you are the sales person and you are managing your own little book distribution business then it doesn't really matter. If you have your own ISBN and your books start selling you could then reprint them on IngramSpark and go bigger. Something you can't do with CreateSpace.

Remember the books you see in stores are actually all there on consignment. Meaning they can all be returned if they don't sell. You can manage it that way or you could price your books so that you could give a big discount with the thought that the stores buys them outright and you don't have to deal with returns. Make it a one way trip. That is what I have done when I have sold books to a store or festival. Also come up with a bulk package. Maybe 10 books at 60% off and free shipping. The store then makes a nice profit and you don't have to get them back. Just work with the price. Go for it

Example:
Essential Chords for Guitar, Mandolin, Ukulele and Banjo
List price on Amazon $14.95
My cost for buying the book directly from CreateSpace is $5.05
My royalty from CreateSpace is $3.92
The rest are Createspace's costs

I could sell this book to a store or event at 50% off the list price of $14.95.

$14.95 x 50% off to the store = $7.47.........$7.47-$5.05 costs = $2.42 profit for me

Or I could raise the price to $19.95 and sell at 50% or 60% off.

$19.95 x 50% off to the store = $9.97.........$9.97-$5.05 costs = $4.92 profit for me
$19.95 x 60% off to the store = $7.98.........$7.98-$5.05 costs = $2.93 profit for me

There are lots of ways to configure this. Free shipping, minimum orders, include a display box such as from Uline.com. What you want to do is figure out a large enough order size and the correct pricing to make it worth while. Stores love free shipping or, come up with a number that covers most of it. If you don't have to run around and pick up books or small checks and make a decent profit this could be a nice little business.






$19.95 x 20 copies = $399.00 x 50% off + $199.5 - $101.00 cost ($5.05 x 20) = $98.50 profit.

Also think about your community, is it a vacation area, is it historical, does it have interesting things. Could you make a book around what is there and sell it in local stores. Ask your local retailers if they would sell your books. Or what kind of books would they like to sell in their stores. Basically create custom books for your community. I know of someone who created a fun summer children's book and sold it around the lake in their area. Every summer they would print 3,000 copies and just sell them in local stores. They could manage it, they lived there and deliver the books and pick up the checks. Could you do something like that. Do you have a store, go to festivals, sell at a farmers market. All opportunities to create a book or series of books and sell them.

Resource, Uline.com for display boxes, https://www.uline.com/BL_5609/Corrugated-Displays

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/

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Publishing Your Book, Overview from Writing, to Kindle Book to Selling Online and on Your Website



This video is in response to a question in my How to Publish Your Book Facebook Group


Publishing Your Book, Overview from Writing, tp Kindle Book to Selling Online and on Your Website from Bruce Jones on Vimeo.

Hello. I am new to the group and looking for some advice. I’ve never published or sold and ebook and am trying to do both via my own web site. I’m hoping this is an appropriate group to seek help, if not, please let me know.

Here is my situation. I’m completing a draft of a short book or pamphlet. I envision writing 5-6 pamphlets over the next couple years. The pamphlet will likely end up less than 40 pages. The pamphlet is a very simple document, all text with 3-4 simple diagrams. From what I have read, I believe this process is this:

1. Once final edit is complete, I need to convert the document to an appropriate ebook format: pdf or others. What format is recommended? What software is required? How difficult is this to do?

2. I currently have a wordspress.com site, but I believe I need to move to a worpdpress.org site where necessary plugins are available to: upload document, handle e-pay and document release. Is this the correct process? What plugins are recommended?

Thanks, any advice is appreciated.

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/

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

The Road to AUM, by Sandra Powers Murphy, Un-boxing the Hard Cover Book

I help produce a new book recently called The Road to AUM by Sandra Powers Murphy. It is a marketing book for the financial services industry and asset growth. It was a cool project that covered pretty much all aspects of self-publishing. Not only did we do the paperback book using CreateSpace but we also did a hard cover with book jacket on IngramSpark and a Kindle e-book. Sandra also created an audio version and she is producing 12 workbooks to go along with the main book. All around we did it all. I love being able to do one action and then repurpose it for many other products.

Sandra works in the financial services area as a marketing and sales consultant. She is the founder and CEO of ARK Global LLC. This book celebrates 10 years of marketing and sales knowledge in helping firms look for money and market their services.
The Road to AUM in paperback and hard cover
Along with her book, Sandra also created an excellent author/book blog to help market it. Noble Ark Ventures.com. The website layout info on the book, resources, speaking opportunities, she is really taking advantage of all aspects of this book. The website builds out your backend for sales and the opportunities that having a book brings you. Your book may not be where most of your money comes from when you self-publish. It might come from the course your develop, consulting or speaking.

Author/Book website for The Road to AUM, https://www.noblearkventures.com/
The Road to AUM is a great example of all the different things you can do around one idea. The book was written using MS Word. I created the printed versions in Adobe Indesign then copied out the final text back into Word and used Kindle Create to create the e-book Kindle version. Sandra actually hired a recording studio to create the audio version which will use ACX.com from Amazon for hosting.

Sandra Power Murphy's book The Road to AUM is available on Amazon in paperback, hard cover, Kindle and Audio

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/

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Thank you Becky for the Support for I Want to Publish My Book But I Don't Know How

Thank you to Becky for your support for my new book I Want to Publish My Book But I Don't Know How: Everything You Need to Know to Create an e-Book or Print Book






I Want to Publish My Book But I Don't Know How: Everything You Need to Know to Create an E-book or Print Book

Available on Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Want-Publish-Book-Dont-book/dp/1985322250/


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/

Monday, January 15, 2018

How I Sell My Books Master Class Webinar, Wednesday, January 17 at 5:00pm Eastern Time


I am pleased to announce my first Master Class for the Publishing Mastery Academy
for this Wednesday, January 17 at 5:00PM Eastern Time on 


How I Sell My Books Master Class 

One of the most common questions I get is around marketing and selling your book. You just published your book on Amazon and congratulations, but now what? You might have done a book launch but what do you do on day two. How do you get sales? How do you turn this into a business? This is where I focus. The launch or even a best seller launch is fun if it happens but it is a lot of work to pull off. And it doesn’t really set you up for the long-term sales of your book. Books can be like little engines, just kind of chugging along with regular continual sales.

In this Master Class webinar I will focus on what I do to sell my books for years and years? This will be a live interactive training held over Zoom.us. Hope you can join me. I will also be posting the replay after the webinar.

My goal for 2018 the Publishing Mastery Academy is to have monthly publishing trainings on publishing books using Indesign, PowerPowerPoint, Marketing, Products and much more.

Included in the Master Class How I Sell Books Training:
• My #1 Tip if I had to give only one tip
• Building your author platform
• Using the Amazon sales page effectively
• Selling from inside your book
• On and Off-line book selling
• The thumbnail test
• Is your Table of Contents working for you?
• Your 5 Key book pages, and many more



Along with the training will be a How I Sell 4,000 Books a Year pdf notes that you can download.
Click Here to Join the Master Class How I Sell Books
https://bruce-the-book-guy.usefedora.com/p/publishing-mastery-101-master-class-how-i-sell-book


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/

Monday, November 20, 2017

My Number One Tip for Selling Your Book, Blog Your Book

Blog Post from BruceTheBookGuy.com with a sell block at the bottom

I had a question recently from a member of my How to Publish Your Book Facebook group for my one tip. It went like this.

The Question:Hey Bruce! Hope you’re doing well! I feel like I hit a wall. I’m averaging about a book a day...not sure if that’s what I should expect? Anyway, I have about a billion ideas running through my head but unfortunately, I don’t have the time to execute them all with my full-time job. I guess I’m looking for one thing to really focus on to push sales...blog...press release.... social media...would you suggest one over the other?

My Answer On the One Thing I Would Do to Market and Sell My Book: Hi I am a fan of creating content for platforms that hangs around for a long time. Like a blog posts or web pages, YouTube videos, Linkedin post and Pinterest. Things that can be done once and shared to many places over and over, like blog posts and videos can. I like to use my book content as my blog content and then add ads on the blog for my own stuff wrapped around my own stuff.
I would take your entire book and break it up into small chunks and blog it bit by bit adding really good titles for each post. At the bottom of each post I would add a sell/bio line about the you and your book and where you can get it. Key is to have be short and have a live link to the book’s sales page on Amazon.
Google will index your book and bring you traffic. If your reader likes it they might decide to purchase a copy. You job is to give them a clear path to purchase. Use your book's content to bring in traffic about your book and wrap ads for your book around it. You can also mix in videos and other content between the posts. Be sure to also add a thumbnail image of your book cover in the sidebar area with a clear Buy at Amazon button on it or below it.
This does several things, it spreads your content out, it gets Google to index your content, and gives you info which you can see in your blog stats what people are interested in. This also gives you lots of posts to market other products like a journal or related Amazon products. The goal here is to get lots of people to see your stuff. From my own experience, you need to get 100-200 visitors to your site to make a sale. This is 1-.05%, which is about the same as direct mail marketing. If you can get 200 people to visit your site from searching for your content you will get a sale if you give them an easy way to know you are selling something and an easy way to buy.
I am also a huge fan of YouTube videos and post on Pinterest. Both of these platforms get a lot of traffic and the content hangs around forever. Videos can be shared all over the web and Pinterest just gets a ton of traffic. Video descriptions and Pinterest posts can have live links, be sure to include them
An advantage of blogging is that the content will stay visible for years. You can also easily share it across many other social media platforms. I know Facebook and Twitter is all the rage but the problem is that everything is so temporary. It just keeps rolling down out of view.
A couple of other tips for your blog. Add a resource page around your topic. You can build this out over time but I have found this to be one of the highest traffic pages on my book blogs. Find something new, just keep adding it. Google loves pages like this. Be sure to include the links.
Another tip; your content may not lend itself to this but if you are able to write about costs of things or how much money you make or something around money, you will get a lot of traffic. People just want to know about money and costs.
Another tip; put up a sample pdf chapter that people can sign up for and download. In the pdf have a book sales page with live links to Amazon. This builds your email list and gets your content in people’s hands.
If you are going to be promoting your book in social media be sure you are where your readers are. Where they hang out is where you hang out. Is it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, etc?
On the second question: selling book a day isn't bad. For me a nice medium seller is 15-20 books a month, in reality that is pretty good. 200+books a year. I will be writing about repurposing your content further in this book. But adding a journal or workbook to your book and selling it on your blog can be a great idea to increase your sales.

J. Bruce Jones is the author of over 40 books. He is currently working on a new book called How I Sell 4,000 Books a Year. Sign up over on the right to get the latest pdf version. It isn't fully edited but has all my ideas.


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