Aug
22
How To Make $12,246 in a Day, Part Four: Other Ebook Stuff
Well, it’s been quite a week. We’ve covered figuring out if you have a market for your ebook, we’ve covered how to write an ebook, and we’ve covered how to sell the damn thing. So why are we still here? Because you’d be really surprised by all the extra stuff that comes along with it.
You read about people who get book deals talking about how their whole life falls apart in the process of trying to get the whole thing to come together. You wouldn’t think that would transition over to a document of fewer than 100 pages that you’re publishing yourself. Well, maybe you would. I sure as hell didn’t.
With that in mind, here are a few parting thoughts.
Get an accountability partner.
There are not a lot of things that I know for sure in this world, but here’s one. I can tell you with absolute certainty that my book would never have seen the light of day if it weren’t for Charlie Gilkey of the mostly as-yet-undiscovered Productive Flourishing. He’s my fucking guru. He runs a little semi-secret service that he calls “UnAss Yourself consulting” and without it, I would be a lot poorer right now. (Yeah, not so semi-secret anymore, is it? Sorry dude, but I promised full disclosure.)
The whole premise here is that creative types don’t often handle the whole get-off-your-ass-and-write-the-fucking-book thing very well. Charlie, on the other hand, waves his little productivity wand and makes it happen. (I have a feeling that his incredibly soothing Southern voice helps tremendously. Things just don’t seem so overwhelming when he goes all uber-calm-yes-ma’am dude on your ass.)
(SIDE NOTE FOR THE LADIES AND GAY MEN OUT THERE: I really don’t recommend looking at his picture when you’re talking to him. It’s, um, distracting. Don’t succumb. There’s plenty of time to drool when the book’s done.)
Seriously, though. Go to Charlie, go to your mom if he’s busy, go to whoever, but if you have trouble getting big projects done, you NEED someone like this in your life. Pay whatever it costs because the ROI is unmatchable.
Get someone to do what you can’t.
I was lucky to have a team of very nice people helping me with all the crap I didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. The by now famous Dave Navarro helped with set-up stuff. My husband was instrumental in figuring out images and stuff. The point here is, you can’t do everything and you’ll waste your time trying.
If you don’t have a team of people itching to help you in exchange for you saying nice things about them on your blog and you’re not a graphic designer, you’ll want software. eCoverGenerator and eBookGenerator are the Mac Daddies in this capacity. Buying them together (which I pretty strongly recommend) will run you about $!60. (I think they have a sale on.) No self-respecting graphic designer will do it for less than triple that, and once you own the software, you can use it as many times as you want.
While I’m all for giving the graphic designers of the world extra work, if you don’t have the cash, you don’t have the cash. Invest in the software. (If you do have the cash, my mom is a graphic designer and she’ll probably do it for about a thousand bucks, depending on length. Email me and I’ll give you her info.)
Be prepared to re-release.
I have not sent out a second version of SEO School because I’ve taken it down, but if that wasn’t the case, I’d send out something spiffier. (Although if I get one more angry email from some pissed off stranger saying I’m a dirty filthy Marketing Type for taking it off the market I’ll put it back up there just to shut them up and damn the consequences.) But there will be stuff you’ll forget or screw up or whatever. A couple of my links were broken. Everybody and their mother thought the book would’ve been better if I’d had a linkable table of contents. Some of the paragraphs could’ve been laid out a little better.
If you plan to release any product or service ever, I very strongly recommend you read Nick Cernis’ One Month Launch. The first bit is about his new product — and I’ll be reviewing that soon so you can probably just skim it — but after that he gets to some very important and inspirational stuff about just shoving your stuff out there and getting on with making money. Very good stuff. Do it now. Fix it later. Gmail’s still in beta, for God’s sake. If it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for us.
If the things you need to change are little — broken links and stuff — you can also take an interim step and email buyers to give them corrections. Just Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) them so you don’t end up giving out everybody’s email addresses like cheap wine at a gallery opening.
Support: Objective Vs. Encouraging
If you’re anything like me at all, you’ll find your first product launch to be incredibly emotional. (If you’re more even keeled than me, that might not be the case.) For all I know, this emotionalness extends into every subsequent product but good holy Lord I hope not. Or I at least hope I get used to it.
Here’s the thought process life-cycle of product launch:
10:14 am: “This is going to change the world of ebooks. I’m going to be so fucking rich it’s ridiculous.”
10:17: “Nobody’s bought it yet.”
10:23: “OHMYGOD someone bought it.”
10:23:09: “Fuck, what if they’re the only one who buys?”
10:25: “Maybe if nobody buys through affiliate links the affiliates will think it’s THEM that sucks and not me.”
10:27: “You know what would be cool? If we sold like, ten grand worth. Do you know how much we could do with ten grand?”
10:28: “I can’t believe we’ve only sold three copies. This is bullshit. Do they not KNOW?”
10:30: “Oh my God, my book is crap.”
10:37: “YAY!!! Someone reviewed it!!!”
10:37:27: “That motherfucker said he thought the price was high. I’ll fucking kill him. I will find him and I will kill him using only my hands and a chair leg. I’m not joking. I swear to God, I’ll fucking do it.”
10:37:42: “Oh. Never mind. He said he thought it was well worth the money. That was nice. Wasn’t that nice? That was totally nice.”
I’m sure you get the idea. The fact that I am still married after all of this is a testament to my husband’s incredible patience.
The point is, the whole thing will fuck you up and that’s totally normal. You’ll need two types of people on hand. You’ll need people to hold your hand and be excited for you when you succeed or hold your hand and cry with you if the universe doesn’t recognize your genius. And you’ll need someone to tell you you’re being totally ridiculous. Neither is optional and having them be the same person is not recommended.
That’s it. That’s all I got. Fire questions if you’ve got ‘em or email me if you want. I aim to please. (OK, that’s not totally true. I am to make as much money as possible so I can spend three quarters of my waking day tipsy, but the only way I’ll get there is by pleasing. So I guess, in a roundabout way, I really do aim to please.)
A link, and first comment! Awesome.
I never knew my voice was reassuring, but if it works, hey, that’s good to know.
The great thing which will nevermore be secret is how much fun it was to work with you to see this thing through. Yes, even getting you to talk about it when you didn’t want to – which was like every time we talked about it.
Thanks so much for the kind review. So, when’s our next one? :p
Your timeline is hilarious. I *so* relate to that kind of roller coaster.
Oh, and your aside about the distracting factor? Um, yeah. I see what you mean. ;-)
Hehe, that timeline is hilarious indeed! I’ve gone through the same (but stretch the timeline by a lot!).
Now I’ve got to put work in making sure it gets bought more often! What are your thoughts about timing? Is it essential to do it all right at the launch? And if you haven’t done it all right, do you think there’s a time when you’re too late?
@ Charlie — I don’t want to talk about it. :P
@ Tzaddi — ;-) indeed.
@ Lodewijk — Well, the better your launch, the fewer total strangers will email you telling you how much you suck. And you do as much as you can. But in general, I wouldn’t put off launch because something administrative isn’t perfect.
“Is it essential to do it all right at the launch?”
Your product has to be the best it’s going to be. (Well, the best it’s going to be before a few hundred strangers look at it, anyway. No faster way to find out how much it sucks than to put it out into public, but bloggers are used to that.) Your landing page has to be very, very good, otherwise you’ll lose people who won’t come back to see the improved one. But other than that, the rest isn’t too big a deal.
“And if you haven’t done it all right, do you think there’s a time when you’re too late?”
I’d say no, as long as the information isn’t out of date. You have a very healthy subscriber count and you’re going to get new fans every day. Today’s new fan doesn’t know what you fucked up six months ago, so I wouldn’t say there’s a “too late”.
Thanks for your swift reply! The information in my eBook is virtually timeless, so that’s not the problem. I think the content and design are up to par too. BUT…I’m a total noob on the landing page thing, and consequently didn’t get that right on the launch of my eBook (my landing page is a blog post…WAY too many places to click besides “Buy now”). I’m going to dig into that part of the process now.
So I got some parts right, but for the marketing I made the capital mistake ;)
Thank you so much for the great series! I was laughing my head off at the “thought process life-cycle of product launch”. That will so be me! :)
And then put aside a good 25% for the children’s therapy, right? That;s what I do anyway.
You are “a dirty filthy Marketing Type for taking it off the market” :)
I know it’s not an e-mail, but would you consider listing it for sale in the future?
@Lode –
As long as your info is relevant (which it is), it’s worth keeping up there :-)
One thing I learned, though, is you’ve got to continually promote it on your blog, by mentioning it in posts, featuring a strong banner on it, making a solid landing page, etc.
Shit, you weren’t kidding about Charlie. Excuse me while I compose myself.
I love this series. Everyone else in the universe tells you it’s easy so they can sell you something. You, on the other hand, make me feel better for my project only being a moderate train wreck.
Fucky, I keep forgetting to update my link to go to my ultrasexy new blog.
Awesome timeline :) And great series Naomi. Seriously, this is by far one of the most important reads in the past year for me. I am contacting you about the PDF shortly.
Aw, hey, thanks for the mention. You know we’re always there for you. (Except when we’re not at home, of course.)
If ebooks about ebooks hadn’t already been done to death, this series would have made a truly excellent min-ebook.
Three things I’d like to add:
1) Watch out for piracy
If your ebook becomes moderately popular, people are going to upload it to bit torrent and other shifty sharing sites.
Luckily, I was prepared for this from day 1, but it was still a big problem for me — someone paid for my ebook and uploaded it to a shady site while I was sleeping. It was downloaded over 600 times before I put a stop to it. I found out who was responsible and sent an artfully-phrased email telling them not to be such a wazzock in future. Everything’s been resolved now, but it’s something others should look out for.
The best way to catch it is to set up a Google Alert for your ebook’s filename, including the .pdf extension. If you’re then alerted to the book’s release in the wild, go to the site in question and find their “copyright” policy, which will normally be linked to from the page footer. They all have a step-by-step guide to proving ownership of a copyrighted product and having all future uploads disabled, and all of them have worked for me so far, even if it took 3 days sometimes.
If anyone needs help with this, please email me and I’ll help you out for free. I’d hate to think anyone would lose out because they’re not sure how to stamp down on it.
2) Find out where your sales are coming from
This is especially important to do before you start advertising. How you do it depends on what traffic analysis tool you’re using and who’s supplying your checkout/download process.
With e-junkie, I coded a short piece of PHP that adds the referrer (the address of the site who sent you the customer) onto the shopping cart buttons. This gets stored in the e-junkie sales database, and I review it once a month when I’m deciding whether or not to renew paid ads. If other e-junkie users are interested, email me and I’ll be happy to help with this.
3) Calculate your conversion rate
This is as simple as measuring the traffic to your product page (I use Google Analytics) and comparing it to the number of people who bought your ebook. 100 visitors in a day? 3 sales? Your conversion rate is 3%. Obviously you should take an average over a month or so.
If you know that about 3% of visitors to your ebook’s minisite will show you the money, you now have an actionable formula for making cash. Let’s say you want to make $1000 this week and you get $20 net from each book sale. You just have to do this:
1) $1000/$20 = 50 book sales required per week
2) 50/3 x 100 = 1668 visitors required per week
3) 1668/7 days = 239 visitors required per day
Voila! All you have to do to make $1000 this week is to get 239 new people to visit your site every day. You can buy that traffic, or get it from affiliates (adjusting the net profit in your calc above), or drive it from a site you own, but you now have an actionable figure to work with. I’ve been doing this for the past 6 months (with different figures) and it really works.
If you want to make more money than that, you can either boost your traffic, increase your conversion rate, or put up the price of your ebook. It’s not rocket science, but it’s a massively undervalued idea that’s quite powerful.
I regularly work with people who obsess over their traffic without acting on the results. It’s a shame — if you’re going to waste your life measuring stats, at least use them to make you some vodka dollars.
“the thought process life-cycle of product launch” is remarkably similar to the five minutes of sending home a freshly groomed dog (with appropriate substitutions of thoughts but not of emotions.)
Nick, that is so helpful, I didn’t realize one could actually stop bittorrent pilfering.
@Nick – thank you for the information, and thank you for the email reply about the ejunkie code. I appreciate it a lot, and great tip on the google alert for the ebook file name. Never thought of that.
Oh, well there you go. Put it back up for sale *with* corrections and a table of contents, and *without* ongoing support. Easy peasy. See?