Created
Apr 16, 2023 8:44 PM
Tags
courseswritingmarketing
- Consider using a pen name/pseudonym (Greg is a pseudonym) if you have varied interests/want to experiment in different genres
- Greg has math books and Christian books under another name
- Possible to work at your own pace for these kinds of projects
- Don’t worry about not being the expert: summarize content from existing sources
- Will Greg’s strategy work for other genres? E.g. Hassan Osman and other authors have succeeded in the leadership/productivity category
- Use Kindle Direct Publishing
- Greg started in 2011 (11 years ago!)
- Unlike Gumroad (where you peak on launch and need to constantly maintain), Amazon has a longer tail
- Greg doesn’t have social media and doesn’t rely on audience building strategies outside of Amazon
- Publish first or build an audience first? Publish first b/c this is not an audience dependent platform (Greg doesn’t even know his readers!)
- Lifetime royalties: $178K
- Be aware of writing about trademarked information
- Greg has 2-3 books written by ghostwriters, but the issue is that when people ask questions you can’t really support them and the quality is not that great, heavy editing work
- Be aware of royalty differences for different pricing ($2.99-$9.99 is what Amazon’s pushing authors towards)
- Use KDP paperback / hardcover template and cover template (most common is 6” x 9”)
- E.g. the margins are actually uneven on purpose to account for the book spine 🤯
- Julian suggests Kindle Create App
- Researching markets
- Best Seller Rank: 40K = selling 20 copies
- Ideal BSR - below 200K
- Use JungleScout to research books and markets to estimate sales
- Assess competition: can you beat the bestseller in the category?
- Use AMZ suggestion expander to see what people are actually searching for
- E.g. for Debug Your Meditation - search Vipassana Meditation instead of just Meditation to reduce competition
- Systematize your book publishing content - think of a system for your content and make tweaks to own the category with volume
- Use the same outline
- Greg doesn’t depend on ads much (he uses some)
- Automatic ads from Amazon
- He spent $43.05 in the last30 days and earned $351.74 sales and ACOS was 12.24% (<50% = profit)
- Free impressions (since it’s cost-per-click only)
- How to get reviews
- Write useful books
- Have a way for the user to contact you
- EMBED THROUGHOUT THE BOOK: Motivate users to contact you (freebie, etc. - 1:1 support, cheat sheet, etc.)
- Greg’s course outline:
- Greg will give you his programming books for free with the course and there’s a royalty guarantee