The very first book I self-published on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) was The Power of Daily Journaling. That was three years ago. I just republished it. One of the things I learned from my mentor was that when a book is selling well, add more value for your readers. If the book is a skinny, beef it up a bit. I did. Doubled the content with more real life stories and thought provoking insight.
Its trending well. I’m keeping my fingers crossed but more importantly I’m really excited to see what affect some of the new tactics I applied will have on this book. I kept track of everything.
But first a bit of background.
Three years ago I bought a course on how to publish eBooks on Amazon. For most of my life I flirted with writing but never took it seriously. Writers are notoriously grouped in the “starving artist” category and the notion of becoming a starving artist had zero appeal to me.
One evening at a Meetup my ears perked up, my brain became a sponge as I listened with intense interest to our keynote speaker that evening. He was a successful internet marketer, pulling in a cool 60K/month and growing.
Impressed? You bet I was! But not for the reason you might think. While 60K/month isn’t exactly chump change, our roster of previous speakers laid boast to the fact that there were plenty of dudes in that bracket.
So no big deal.
But what was a big deal was another number he threw out, one that was significantly smaller, a mere $10,000 royalty payments he received monthly from Amazon. He went on to explain that the springboard to his big bucks was a small publishing business he started a few years back publishing eBooks on Amazon, and from there he spun out other complimentary businesses.
Granted 10K isn’t what legends are made of, but at 10K one did not need to live the life of a starving artist. One could live reasonably well. It wasn’t the 60K that interested me, it was the 10. Hah! I could write and eat too!
The short of the long of it I bought his course. Diligently followed every step of it. Wrote the Power of Daily Journaling, some 4000 words of it. The objective was to publish a short book and at 4000 words it qualified.
I continued to polish those 4000 words over and over and over.
The book was ready but I wanted to make it better. It was ready for the press. Who was I kidding? All this polishing was procrastination, pure and simple. It was just a stalling tactic!
Truth was I was afraid.
Afraid that no one would see it.
Afraid that if they saw it they would not buy it.
Afraid that if they did buy it they would not read it.
Afraid of the ultimate rejection that they would return it for a refund.
But my worst fear of all was that someone would buy the book, actually read it and post a negative review.
Mike Litman’s words rang clearly “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going”
So I mustered all the courage I could, logged into my KDP account, and tremulously pressed the PUBLISH button.
Surprise of all surprises!
People found the book.
People bought the book.
Some even liked it and posted nice reviews.
My new small business was short lived. After publishing six books within a year, I turned my attention back to running my digital media marketing business. I put those six books on the set-it-and-forget-it shelf.
And then a funny thing happened. Every month on or about the 29th, Amazon makes royalty deposits straight to my bank from every country that my books sold in. A while back I logged into my bank account on the 29th and yup, there they were, four royalty deposits from the four countries in which my books sold.
Residual income!
That is an author’s holy grail.
The penny dropped. My entrepreneur self kicked in. It was time to revisit the self-publishing industry. I reached out to some of my former colleagues. Connected with new ones. I found that there was a lot more than just pressing the publish button on Amazon. There were so many more things I could do to revitalize my small publishing business and increase the cash flow. The obvious was write more books. The not so obvious was to take one of my existing books, beef it up with additional content, create a new cover, fine tune the title and republish.
That is the wonderful thing about writing and publishing eBooks. It’s so easy to improve on an existing book and republish.
I chose my first and best selling eBook: Power of Daily Journaling. Immediate steps I took:
- Changed the title from: Power of Daily Journaling 101
to: Power of Daily Journaling - Shortened the subtitle from: Keeping a Daily Journal Will Help You Uncover Your Authentic Self, Unleash Your Hidden Potential and Live Your Life with Abundance and Prosperity
to: Uncover Your Authentic Self, Unleash Your Hidden Potential and Live Your Life with Abundance and Prosperity. - Beefed up the content from 4000 words to almost 18,000.
- Redesigned the cover
And just like that, the book was republished.These were the immediate steps.
There are others. I will keep track of each step and share the results with you. I will keep polishing and maximizing marketing strategies for this book, and the others that I have, I will also write and publish more books.
Glad to report that sales of Power of Daily Journaling have doubled and trending well.
Valentina