Amazon Self-publishing 4: Price Your Book to Sell and Name It to Be Found | Brian Jackson | Skillshare

Amazon Self-publishing 4: Price Your Book to Sell and Name It to Be Found

Brian Jackson, Author/Publisher/Educator

Amazon Self-publishing 4: Price Your Book to Sell and Name It to Be Found

Brian Jackson, Author/Publisher/Educator

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4 Lessons (23m)
    • 1. Introduction to Marketing when you Self-publish

      0:40
    • 2. Price Your Book to Sell

      12:30
    • 3. Name Your Book to Be Found

      9:14
    • 4. Amazon Self-publishing 6 Conclusion

      0:26
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About This Class

Amazon Self-publishing 4: Price Your Book to Sell and Name It to Be Found

In this, the 4th and final class in this Amazon Self-publishing series, you'll learn how to price your book at the sweet spot to be sold and to name your book using keywords so that it can be found.  These two steps are probably the most crucial in marketing your Kindle book.

The two topics addressed in this class are:

  • Price Your Book to Sell
  • Name Your Book to Be Found

Be sure to watch the entire series if you're interested in self-publishing.

I'll see you in the classroom,

---Brian

Meet Your Teacher

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Brian Jackson

Author/Publisher/Educator

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Born in Los Angeles in the middle of the last century, I have always wanted to be a writer. After twenty-five some odd years spent working in the computer industry in the heart of the Silicon Valley, first for Lockheed as a Systems Programmer and later for Cisco Systems as a test tool developer, I managed to retire early and begin my next career as a self-published author.

Along with writing and publishing my own novels I also publish the works of my wife, Melanie Jackson. During the past four years I've published well over 100 books in paperback and eBook formats. Oddly enough this includes eBooks on how to self-publish books and how to create professional looking book covers using the GIMP. I've also recorded and distributed a pair of audiobooks available for purchase on Amazon... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Introduction to Marketing when you Self-publish: Hello and welcome to the fifth class in my Amazon self publishing. Siri's This class named Price Your book to sell and name it to be found is part of an extended Siri's. You're currently viewing Class six, which has been split in half due to its length in this class. I'm going to explain why to 99 is the sweet spot for pricing your book. I'm also going to explain why and how you should use keywords to name your book so that it can be found. So if you're ready, let's begin. 2. Price Your Book to Sell: Hello and welcome to the lesson entitled Price. Your book to sell in this lesson, we're going to look at Amazon e book pricing. You could consider this an author's introduction to the business of self publishing books. The KDP field that we be feeling in is this one here, and what I'm going to try and convince you through this lesson is that you should set your royalty to 70% the highest possible and set your price 2 to 99. The sweet spot. But let's begin with a rather rambling journey. But trust me, we're gonna end up back to Price and explaining it to you. But now I want to talk about word count and traditional book length, the most meaningful measure of your writing output. His word count and about 250 words equals one page. There are industry standard links for various traditional forms of writing. For instance, a long novel is ah, 100 k words, or about 400 pages. Once you get beyond that, you're writing a long novel. Ah, standard novel. 90 K short novels 65 k novella 35 k A technical guide gets down to about 20 k and a short story five K. Now remember the readers thinking pages, but writers think in words. You might want to come back and refer to the slide so you can memorize some of the links in this table. Now let's look at book length in the electronic age. These numbers I just provided to your useful reference points and readers are familiar with these traditional lengths. However, many of these links were imposed by print publication requirements that no longer apply in Elektronik Age. My point right, any length you'd like in e book format. But try not to stray too far from the traditional expectations of your readers. Now I want to talk about word counting how to measure it. Microsoft Word locates word count in the lower left hand corner of the screen right after the page count. It shows you the number of words that are in the document. If you saw if you make a selection, it will show you the number of words in the text that you selected. Now let's talk about writing speed and duration. An easily attainable personal daily output goal for me is an average of 1000 words per day . I might write 500 words On some days I might write 2000 words on others, but I average about 1000 words a day when I'm writing. That would mean that a long novel would take about 100 days. A standard novel. 80 short novel. 65. A novella about a month. A technical guide 20 days in a short story. Five I write and revised at a rate of 500 words per hour, or about two hours per day. And it's primarily because of this waterfall effect that I usually edit as a right. So my first draft looks very clean, but it makes me write a little slower. Probably not a strategy want to adopt now. What you should do is determine your own writing pace to determine your writing pace right for an hour. Note in word your word count before you start writing and noted after then just subtract the before from the after. To get your word count per hour. Determine your daily writing commitment, for example. I'm willing to write two hours per day. In this example that would mean 1084 words per day then you determine the number of days required to produce the work in your chosen genre. Let's say we're going to write a short novel of 65,000 words divided by 1084 is 60 days or two months. Now let's talk about Amazon e book royalties. Amazon awards a 70% royalty to any author who will follow these two rules. Price your e book from to 99 to 99 and offer your book for no less through a competitors. Otherwise, Amazon defaults to a 35% royalty, producing half the revenue for you. Amazon Onley offers a 35% royalty fees for certain countries of your night in the select program, and the minimum price you can set for a book is 99 cents. And let's see what we could do with all of those numbers. Amazon E Book Prices There are three important Amazon e book price points. 99 cents is the lowest price that you can set for a book, and it's actually with the way that Amazon is treating free. These days, it's become the new free, but notice the only get 35% so in a 99 cent book you get 35 cents to 99 is the minimum price at which you can get 70%. It's the sweet spot. At 2 99 you make 209 per book. And then, of course, 1999 is the highest you can set, and I've never even come close. I don't recommend you dio notice that a to 98 you make a dollar for, whereas a 2 99 1 cent higher, you make twice as much or 209 That's the sweet spot 209 where the revenue jumps. Other prices. I use three book bundles. I often price them at 5 99 which will net you for 19 and the latest release. I usually charge 3 99 for that charge, a premium for the latest in a series. Now let's look at the sweet spot graphically. Here you can see the chart rising slowly from zero to 99 cents, where you get 35 cents to 70 cents for a dollar, 99 on up, and then what? You had to 99. You jumped to 209 revenue. That's the sweet spot the green line. Here. You want to work hard to price your book at 2 99 Now, why not set your price higher? After all, you keep getting 70% right up until 9 99 Why not increase your price beyond to 99 all way up to 999 to generate more revenue in a word competition, you want to set your price at the minimum that will receive, Ah, 70% royalty. Take a look at the books that are popular in your genre. You're gonna see the lot of them are priced to 99 or even 99 cents. Price is the first item under your control in which you're able to compete with your competition. Now let's look at a sample publishing strategy. Let's say I write short books 50 to 65,000 words or 50 to 65 days, and I write a series of books. I always recommend you write short and writing a Siri's. I would charge 99 cents for the first book. That's the lead magnet to 99 for subsequent books. That's my meat and potatoes 5 99 for three book bundles books 234537 and so on. You want to prove your readers that there's economy and commitment and then finally charged 3 99 for the most recent book charge a premium for the new stuff and that would produce something that would look like this where your first book is 99 cents. You're only gonna make 35 cents per sale two through four or 2 99 and the latest book is 3 99 Noticed that I bundled books two through four into a bundle for 5 99 Now let's look at the waterfall self publishing process. After all the phases in publishing each book overlap. Given a 60,000 word book, I might take two days for outlining, 60 for writing and revision and three days for editing. And then I have seven days for a copy editor, one to publish but notice those last two are not necessarily involving me full time. So they overlap with another two days to outline, and I just keep cascading and releasing books. Notice that I need to include research time in here. I usually don't do a lot of research for my book, so I don't include it. But you may in your calculations, so I can repeat this process every 66 days. Given 365 days a year. That means that I can produce 5.5 books per year. Let's look at what a waterfall might look like After two months of writing, we release our first book in March for 2 99 Two months later, we released our second book, which we charge for to 99 4 and we change. Our first book to 99 cents, is a lead magnet in July. Outcomes are third book. It jumps to 3 99 the same in September. We add another 3 99 book and finally, in November we have a 99 cent lead magnet are to 99 meat and potatoes 3 99 for the latest book, and we produced a bundle of books two through four for 5 99 I recommend that you determine your own publishing rate, and here's how you do it. You add all the factors that you personally work on, for instance, outlining two days research two days and then I write for 60 days and I self edit for 10 days and I published for one day. That means that it's going to take 75 days. Turn around to produce a book. You can release a book every 2.5 months for almost five books a year. Now I want to take a look at some publishing strategies. Here's one called the Serial Publishing Strategy. It was used by Dickens. It's been used by Stephen King in modern days, and I've seen Cem publishers make a lot of money with it. What you do is you publish a 10 to 20 k word chapter in a continuing saga once every month . Any charge 99 cents for it. Once you have six months accumulated, you release It is a bundle for 2 99 and it looks something like this. Books one through 6 99 cents with a bundle, it's to 99. I've seen people use this strategy a lot to make money. Next, let's look at the technical guide publishing strategy. Most technical guys sell for 99 cents, although if you become a popular guide, I've seen him go to 99 3 99 All the way up to 6 99 What you can do is you can bundle technical guys your cheaper ones to get to that to 99. Sweet spot. Use cheaper, shorter guides, Lead generators for your Maura expensive works. Now I want to talk about how much money matters. For instance, if you sell 100 books at 35 cents a pop, that means $35. Now notice if you jump the price to to 99 a set of 99 cents. Suddenly you're making $209 for 100 books sold. Another way to look at it is how many books do you have to sell to make it to $1000? Will a 99 cents you need to sell 2800 and 57. That drops to 478 of you charge to 99. Okay, I know you've been dying to ask this, so I'm gonna tell you my best book sales month for a single book I published is moving Violation March 2011. I charged 3 99 for the book, which it 70%. Royalty is to 79 per book, and I sold 3000 and five copies for $8384 so you can make money using this pricing strategy . Now what? I recommend you dio choose an appropriate word. Count for your project. Choose something as short as possible, but long enough to charge in to 99. Publish a book approximately every two months for 5 to 6 books a year. You should be able to publish a serial chapter or technical guide every month. Pick up publishing strategy that applies to your situation and charged to 99. Here it is. Here's the field that you're gonna be filling out in. KDP Set it to 70% said it 2 to 99 unless it's a lead magnet or a bundle with latest release . And that's about all that I have to say on that topic. 3. Name Your Book to Be Found: in this lesson, we're going to address naming your book to be found. After all, you can't be bought until you're found. First, let's look at how people find Kindle books. First, they typically go to Amazon. So to me, it isn't a great benefit improving my Google s CEO. Since I don't think people really look for books via Google, they go to Amazon to look for Kindle books, and that's what we want to sell his Kindle E books. Once an Amazon, rather than going to the categories and browsing through those, they typically enter a search string. For instance, if they're interested in Regency romance, they're gonna go to the search box and enter Regency romance rather than tryingto find Regency romance within a cascade of categories. Results are selected using keyword matching so whatever string they put in as a string of keywords that then match keywords for a book and that produces all the results. Those results are then sorted by book rank, so how popular the book is and how well it's doing So given that information, this is what we want to dio. We want to use keywords to name and tagger book Now Where should the keywords go? The book title. The book's subtitle. The book. Siri's Name. Now Actually, these Air just three different ways of saying the book title, since they all merge into the book title anyway. The books description and finally, the books search keywords. So where are these keywords and where can you find them? You can find them in the search string completion database. Defined keywords first identify potential keywords. For instance, if I'm writing a cozy mystery, cozy mysteries a good keyword, type your keyword into the search box and Amazon and use the completion database to find long tail keywords even longer, More specific keywords that are easier to rank in. Then select the words for which you can compete. You do this by looking at the books that are displayed for a keyword and look primarily at the number of reviews to tell whether you can compete with those books, then finally used the keywords to name and tag your book, and that's what we're going to be doing in the rest of this lecture. Now let's cut over to Amazon and see how this works. To begin my keyword search and search I go to Amazon. Once there, I find it best to search in the Kindle bookstore. After all, that's what we're most interested in. The next thing you do is type your keyword. For instance, suppose that we had a Regency romance, a good keyword identify that would be Regency romance. But notice what happens once we type in Regency Romance. The search string completion databases referenced for other potential search strings that we might want to enter these air longer and their more specific and therefore should be easier to compete in. For instance, Regency romance, I can tell you, is going to be hard to compete in. Let's verify that by your entering the search strength, you can see that at the top is a book with 51 reviews and four stars. Actually, here's 9 15 That isn't too bad. Ah, 199. It's going to be hard for a new book to compete in this area, But what if we keep on going? The next is Kindle Is Regency romance Kindle books? We have a Kindle book, and it's a Regency romance. Let's see how that does, and you can see that there's actually much less competition for this long tail keyword than for Regency romance. So what you want to do is to put together a string of keywords and then start entering them and use the command completion database to turn them into a long tail keywords. Let's get rid of Kindle books and see what else is in here. Free books. We don't have a free book Clean. So Clean Regency romance would be something that we want to consider novels. We have a novel. If it's erotica or a box set, we would definitely want to include that. And then we move on to our next keyword. Let's try cozy mystery and see what that does. Notice that here we can have a cozy mystery. Siri's or books that might relate to us free may not relate to us. The seven sleuth set sounds like it's a specific Siri's that somebody's after. Let's try a Siri's and you can see that this gives you further keywords that you could consider here are specific. Siri's. We don't want to use that Kindle unlimited and box set, so if we're a box set, this is the most specific keyword that we can use. Let's see what it produces. 38 71 reviews. This is still pretty difficult to compete with. Here's 11 reviews, so maybe we'll be able to make it onto the first page. This isn't particularly well reviewed. This looks like it's un reviewed. Here's one. So this looks like it has potential as a key word. So we note it down here, I want to show you how I've been accumulating keywords. For instance, I have a paranormal mystery Well, that turned into paranormal mystery Kindle books. Paranormal mysteries also showed up, and I just listed all of the long tail keywords and then reviewed them to see which ones I could best compete in. Here. I'm looking at dream books and nightmares and so on for it for a dream book. Dark Fantasy. Here we have a complete list of my keyword. I have seven of them to use in the search keywords field when identifying my book. So let's go back and look once again at where we put these keywords. So where do we put these keywords? Remember the title? Now I know this is a tough one. Melanie wanted a namer first book moving violation her first cozy mystery. So we named it moving violation. There was no room for keywords in there like Cozy Mystery, But what about a subtitle? Now? Her book doesn't have a subtitle, actually, but it does have a Siri's name. And in that we put Chloe Boston Cozy Mystery. The reason is that we wanted to score high in cozy Mystery, and we also wanted the lead character name in our book to be in the title because people search for that. The descriptions, the other place you should put this. I would definitely need to use the words Cozy Mystery and Chloe Boston A great deal in my description. Say, at least twice and your search keywords. Let's go back to Katie P and look at these fields so that we know where they are. Here we are in KDB, looking at moving violation. Once again, remember the book name that's going to be the title? This is one of this is one good place to put keywords. So if you could somehow were key words in This is great. This is gonna be much easier to do with nonfiction books where the title should be built almost entirely of these key words that you got from the search string completion database . The Chloe Boston mysteries, These air What? I want it. These are the key words I wanted to hit for, so I put them into the Siri's title. The description. It should definitely be in the books description. Several times it should say Khloe, Boston and Mystery, Siri's and other things about mystery. It should say that over and over again. Here's Khloe Khloe Boston. So I'm going to score high for this keyword. Let's go down and look at my keywords. Cozy mysteries. Woman sleuths. That's a nice, long keyword, cozy mystery. Women's sleuths. Siri's, which is different. Cozy mysteries. Kindle books, cozy mystery. Siri's cozy mystery, small town mystery and suspense, Siri's female detective novels. These are the search string completions that I've found that people are searching for that I can actually compete for their long tail keywords. So long, less competitive. If I had gone after just cozy mystery that would have been piled full of books, it would have been hard to compete. But small town mystery and suspense Siri's. That's very easy to compete in, So that's the way that you use keywords to name your book so it can be found 4. Amazon Self-publishing 6 Conclusion: I want to thank you for taking the class. Remember that this class is just one of seven now, so keep your eye out for the other classes in the Siri's. If you want to self publish a Kindle book in this class, we learned to price your book A to 99 the sweet spot to sell more books. We also learned how to name your book using keywords so that it can be found. That's it, and I'll see you in the next class.
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