Kindle Publishing Masterclass

Most of success relates to how you think. In this module we deal entirely with mindset. In this video we discuss assets and how they relate to self-publishing. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• When you are in the business of self-publishing. You are not in the business of creating books you are in the business of creating assets.

• Creating a book that will generate you a fixed amount of income per month, is the same as the real estate investor you buys a property solely for the rental income it can generate.

• Everything spent on books is an investment and the key to increasing your income with self-publishing is publishing more books.

• You must control quality while you are publishing books because the average amount of money you are making per month per book will only stay the same if your quality stays the same.

• Book are assets with defined upfront costs

• More books = more income with quality control

• You have to spend some money and invest when you get started, if you are thinking that you want to get started with nothing then understand that you not likely to succeed.

• You should have 4K to 6K to get started with self publishing.

• Always leave good feedback for your workers on upwork if you are firing them and they did a horrible job and are angry with them.

  • The reason is if you give perfect score they will give you perfect score and your profile will look more attractive to prospective skilled workers when you put out job applications.

• Your biggest struggle in the beginning is building a good team.

In this video the role of debt in your self-publishing business is discussed. You will be introduced to the idea of whether or not debt should be and under what circumstances. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Do not borrow money to start this business.

• Borrowing money will add unneeded stress.

• To follow the advice of the course you will have to spend ALL of your initial investment to try and achieve your goal income which would mean you would have to max out your loan which is a bad decision.

• Save money if you think your need to borrow.

If you want to do business on Amazon.com and you want to succeed at it. Then you will need to mentally prepare yourself to churn. This video will attempt to discuss this idea of churning as it relates to Amazon and your self-publishing business. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Businesses are a reflection of the owner.

• If you want to succeed with Amazon you have to churn

• Churning is the concept of doing something over and over again mechanically until you get your desired result.

• 400, 500, 600, 1000 these are the numbers you should be thinking about to reach your goal and be really successful with publishing i.e. these are the numbers of books you should be planning on trying to publish.

• The key to success is to use outsourcing to build a good team and use systems and processes to help you churn while controlling the quality and you will find your royalties growing, Lord willing.

• Do more and do it faster that is how to succeed at amazon with patience and self-control.

• To be successful you have to churn and churn and mechanically produce content like a robot.

  • Prepare mentally for this being your reality if you want to succeed.

To finish off the module you will need to watch some videos of some highly successful business owners. You will be introduced to the ideas of working hard, churning, being patient, and not borrowing money. These videos are very important to getting the right mindset for success. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Watch the videos. They are very important. Think about what is being said and try to understand that nothing happens quickly, and you have to churn to be successful.

• Get ready to spend all the money you have to invest in this business to achieve your goal and get ready to start churning to get there.

This video will attempt to explain and introduce you to the two main strategies a person can use when embarking on a journey in self-publishing. The video attempts to outline the courses's preferred publishing strategy and some its benefits. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• The 2 styles of publishing are:

  • Going wide

  • Going narrow / focused

• The future proof strategy that the course recommends is a narrow and focused strategy.

• Going narrow means that you will be selecting 1 niche all of your book will cover different topics and aspect of that niche.

• Going wide is a simple publishing strategy that does not require much research. A wide strategy will result in publishing books on many different and unrelated topics.

• When we employ the narrow publishing strategy will be publishing in only 1 niche and we will focus on dealing with all aspects of that niche.

• The goal of a narrow strategy is to build a strong brand within the niche and try to dominate that niche.

This video discusses a wide publishing strategy. Even though the course does not recommend this style of publishing it is still discussed to shed light on how other self-publisher's are competing against you in the marketplace. 

Important Facts From this Lesson

• Most people will publish with a wide strategy because it is currently the method of choice for all online coaches.

• All that matters when selecting a book for publication with wide strategy is that the book is popular i.e. the book has a low sales rank.

• Sales rank is a number generated hourly by amazon for every item that is available for sale and it explains how much that item is selling.

• The lower the sales rank number, the more popular the item is.

  • Any book with a sales rank that is 99K or less is fairly popular is selling at least once per day.

• People who go wide with their publishing will continually look on amazon for books and browse the kindle categories looking at different sales rank. Once the person finds a book with a sales rank of less than 30K they will publish a book that topic.

• A strategy of going wide does not work when you have a crowded marketplace. And when the marketplace continues to get more crowded, this style of publishing becomes less and less effective because you have more people doing the same thing.

• When going narrow you want to focus and build a brand. The goal is for your brand to become synonymous with your niche.

In this video the course's recommended publishing strategy will be presented and explained with a simple example. The attempts to illustrate why this strategy is future proof. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• The best publishing strategy for 2017 and beyond is picking 1 niche and publishing as many books as you possibly can within that one particular niche.

• If you follow the recommendations of the course everything you publish will be within 1 niche. But you will be covering different aspects of that niche.

  • Everything will be published under 1 brand and the brand should relate to the niche.

• An example focused niche with branding would be choosing the niche of computer programming books and creating the brand “EveryoneCanCode”

• You will / should create a website for your brand where you will showcase you books, have a blog, collect reader email addresses. This website will allow you to position yourself as an authority in the niche.

• Within a niche you will be selecting more niches and these are going to be the topics of your books.

• The reason a focused niche strategy works and the reason it is future proof is because you are positioning yourself as an authority in the niche.

This video discusses the first part of the course's recommended publishing strategy: the focused niche and provides an example for further explanation. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• It’s better to be a person that know a lot about 1 thing than to be a person that know a little about many things.

• The person or business that knows a lot about 1 thing is more valuable than the business that knows a little about bunch of things.

• The way you separate yourself in a crowded marketplace is by building a brand in 1 section of the market and being a go-to brand for that 1 thing.

• A focused is niche is when you pick 1 niche and get all of your ideas and all the topics for your books come from that 1 niche you selected.

• You will be selecting 1 broad niche and all of topics for your books with fall under this 1 niche.

• Once you select 1 niche and determine that niche is going to be the niche that all your book will fall under that niche becomes your focused niche.

• A narrow publishing strategy consists of 2 things:

  • Focused niche

    • 1 broad niche that all your niche topics will fall under.

  • Focused niche topic

    • Specific topics that fall under the broad niche and will serve as the topics for your books.

  • For example a focused niche can be dieting. The focused niche topics would be different types of diets i.e. paleo diet, Mediterranean diet, atkin diet, low fat diet, etc. Each individual diet would be a focused niche topic and also would be a different book.

In this video the idea of the focused niche is further dealt with. This time examples are presented to illustrate the point that before selecting a niche to focus on you can be more specific oftentimes. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Once you pick a niche to solely focus on, this niche becomes your focused niche.

• Anything topics that you select within the niche becomes a focused niche topic and these would be topics for books.

• Before you select a given niche to be focused niche remember that you can usually get more specific.

• The more specific you are with focused niche the better and you should select a focused niche that you have some experience with or at least have an interest in.

  • You be dealing with your selected niche for months and months so it is best to select something that are interested in because it will make proofreading more enjoyable.

  • If you have experience in something like let’s say you are a nutritionist pick something related because you will be able to add value because of your knowledge.

• Remember to always be specific when selecting your focused niche if you were to select computer books are focused niche try to be more specific and pick something like:

  • Microsoft office

  • Programming books for beginners

  • Books on social media

  • Using mobile devices

  • Adobe Products

  • etc

Finding focused niche topics i.e. finding book topics can be very time consuming. This video attempts to explain the three methods to finding book topics easily. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Finding focused niche topics systematically means, finding books topics without having to think about them.

• Focused niche topics = book topics. Finding book topics will be hard sometimes.

• When publishing narrow you need to find as many topics as possible so you can publish as many books as possible.

• There are 2 methods of finding book topics with thinking: Google Keyword Planner, and Wikipedia.

• Google Keyword Planner should be your main resource for finding focused niche topics i.e. book topics. Wikipedia is better for outlining be can provide ideas for topics within your topic.

• Once you have selected a focused niche to publishing all your books in you are going to search that niche in Wikipedia and with the Google Keyword Planner to find topics that fall into the niche.

  • So if your broad niche was dieting you would search diet in both Wikipedia and Google Keyword Planner and look for different types of diets. Each diet you find would be a focused niche topic or a book topic.

• You can also try to brainstorm topics but this only viable if you have experience in it i.e. you are a mom and you want to write books on parenting, or you are a nutritionist and you want to write books on nutrition, or you are home-owner and you want to write books on home ownership.

Congrats on finishing Section 3 on niche selection. This video will attempt to explain the actionable steps you must take to properly select a niche and get your brand started. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Consult the list of niches in the resources and select 3 of them.

• Try to pick things that you have an interest in or something that you have some experience with because you will ultimately be dealing extensively with one of these topics for at least 6 months so pick something you care about or something you like to learn about.

• Try to find as many book topics within each niche as possible as explained in the module and the follow along videos.

• After you have done research on each niche select the niche which has the most applicable focused niche topics i.e. pick the one that has the most book topics.

• Remember the number of books you need to publish each week to reach your goal and write this number down.

• Once you have selected the niche you should pick a brand for the niche and register the domain name of the brand. This domain will the face of your publishing operation and will be a means of collecting reader emails and marketing.

Follow along in this video to learn how to find focused niche topics i.e. book topics using the Google Keyword Planner and Wikipedia. Using these tools will allow you find topics without brainstorming. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Remember that you want to find as many topics as possible. Because you want to be able to publish as many books as possible within your given focused niche to dominate it and become an authority.

• Use brainstorming only if you are an expert in your given niche or you have significant experience with the niche.

Outlining is a very important task when creating self-published book for numerous reasons. This video will attempt to introduce you to the general idea of outlines and the role they should play in your business. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• An outline is going to be a list of topics, statements, and questions related to the topic of the book.

• The outline should can anything that you can that is related to the topic that you writing about.

• List all the information in the outline in a way that flows the best. Meaning ask yourself when should the reader be introduced to such and such topic and try to place that topic in the most ideal location in the book.

• After you finish the outline you should ask yourself the question: What else would want to know. Or what else would I like to know.

• Make sure you put as many questions in the outline as possible.

• For example a book on shipping container homes:

• What are the average price of these homes?

• Are they any videos on shipping container homes?

• Tell you writer to answer these questions with research.

• Each week you should create outlines for the number of books you need to publish next week i.e. if you need to publish 4 books per week to reach your income goal then you should be creating 5 outlines per week.

• Write your own outlines for at least the first 6 months of your publishing journey then you can outsource it to another VA or to your writers.

• Remember that an outline can be too detailed and should put as many questions and related topics as possible in the outline.

This video attempts to explain the most important things for you to remember when creating your outlines and attempts to explain why creating outlines is so vital to your business and it's long-term sustainability. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• The more detailed your outline is the better.

• Try to avoid getting lazy when you create your outlines even though with a good writer you may still get back good work but try to put in as much effort as possible into the outline.

• Providing good outlines will help you get back higher quality work, it will help you to build a good team faster, and it will make writing much easier for you or your writer.

• When thinking about your writers you should see them more as researchers than as writers. Your writer’s job is to perform as much research as possible on the topics that you list in the outline then to write about each topic.

• If you are trying to get started with no money then a detailed outline is going to make the process of writing your own book much easier and increase your chance of finishing the book completely.

• The way an outline should be used by either you as the writer of your own books or by your writer is: Go topic by topic through the outline and research each subject. Find relevant links for each topic and place the links directly into the outline.

  • Read each link to get a general understanding of the topic then continue on to the next topic.

  • Once all the topics have been researched the writer should then proceed to write about subject in as detailed a manner as possible. Once each topic has been written about then he writer should link everything together so that the book flows.

• Always try to give actionable steps in your books and give direct instructions on how to get something accomplished related to whatever the topic of the book is.

  • 10 steps to your next container garden.

  • 30 steps to purchasing your next shipping container home.

    • Clearly actionable lists are easy to write about and readers enjoy them. You should try to end your books with these types of lists.

  • Always stress to your writers that they always provide steps for how to do something and always be trying to teach people how to do whatever they are writing about.

This video will attempt to introduce an alternative version of outlining that I experienced personally while working with an online coach and why this alternative version is not ideal when outsourcing. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• As your business grows you should be giving more work to your Vas

• Do not just give a topic to your writers and let them create the outline, not in the beginning.

• Providing an outline for your books will give you higher quality books.

• The main incentive for most writer on upwork is to deliver the specific number of words you hired them for. You may find that the books they deliver to you are missing very important topics if you do not specifically provide outlines.

• Outline will also help you to create well rounded books regardless of the number of words in the book.

• Quality control is extremely important in self-publishing and providing outlines will help to control quality.

This video will attempt to introduce an alternative version of outlining that I experienced personally while working with an online coach and why this alternative version is not ideal when outsourcing. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Make sure that you are using as many resources as possible when you are making your outline.

• The first resource you should use to make your outline is other kindle books that are related to the topic of your book.

  • On amazon you want to get a free preview of the book and look through the table of contents and take a mental note of what is being mentioned in the book i.e. what is being mentioned in the introduction, how is does the book close, etc. You want to first take note of these things then you want to write everything down into your outline that is important in an organized manner.

• After reading the table of contents and extracting the important information you want to read the product descriptions for each book. Look for sections in the description that outline the most important parts of the book and make sure your outline includes these topics as well.

• Look at the reviews of the kindle book and ignore the 5 and 4 star reviews. Also mostly ignore the 1 star reviews. Focus on reading the 3 star reviews and 2 star reviews and try to find reviews that mention things which are missing from the book, add these things to you outline.

• Most reviews on amazon are fake i.e. they are review swaps so all 4 or 5 stars are fake so they should always be ignored.

• Always look at more than one kindle book and try to take 3 or 4 hours to make a full outline.

• The 2nd resource to use when writing your outline is conventional books and textbooks i.e. things that are not self-published and you only want to look at the table of contents for these books and see what is missing from your outline.

  • Ask yourself:

    • How are they starting the book, what are they mentioning in the beginning, middle, and end etc.

  • Use Wikipedia last it is not the best for making an outline but you should check to see if it mentioning something that the other resources did not mention.

  • Make sure to put questions in your outline. If you need to get more content in your outline ask yourself questions and put them in the outline.

  • Also add outside resources like podcasts, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc.

  • Add everything to a Microsoft Word document as an ordered list.

In this video you will given actionable steps to complete module 3. Make sure to complete these steps BEFORE moving on to the next module. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Watch the follow along video of how to make an outline.

• Make outlines for your first set of books to reach your income goal in 6 months.

• When making your outlines try to be as detailed as possible.

Follow along in this video to learn how to browse related books on your topic to harvest relevant information to add to your book and create a clear outline for your writers to follow. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Remember that an outline never be too detailed or two long. Make sure that you use multiple sources when creating your outline i.e. looking at multiple self-published books, conventional published books, and textbooks.

• Remember that outside resources like podcasts, YouTube video, and blog posts are also great sources of information to send to your writers to make the process of writing easier for them.

This video will attempt to introduce the crucial topic of outsourcing and hiring your first team members properly. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Outsourcing is crucial to your success.

• Upwork is main place that you should be using to outsource your work.

• If you want to only hire Americans then you will need to spend much more money. I would recommend spending about 3 times my recommended amount to find American willing to take your work serious.

• I recommend that you stick to the following countries to find a writer: Kenya, Philippines, and Pakistan in that order.

  • These countries will provide the most value for your money.

• For the cover designer I would recommend Eastern Europe or South America.

• Post the job descriptions listed in resources on upwork to get application and start interviewing people who are impressed with.

Outsourcing only makes sense when it profitable for you as the self-publisher and valuable for your team members. This video will attempt to explain how much you should be spending when you begin to hire workers to perform various tasks in your business. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• There are only two things that you should be spending money in the beginning:

  • Writing

  • Book cover design

• When outsourcing you have to cover the fees that upwork takes from your workers. Which means you have to pay everyone 20% higher.

• You should be paying $1.20 for every 100 words to your writer and a book 3K word book should cost about $36.00.

• You should be paying $6 for every cover and you should always purchase you won stock photos from depositphotos for your covers.

  • Do not let people on Upwork trick you into believing that you should be paying more for a cover. Only pay the recommended amounts and find someone who is good with photoshop to work with.

• The reason you can pay this much to your designer is we will be providing the designer with inspiration and this will make the overall cover design process much easier and faster for them.

When designing a cover there is a recommended process that would hopefully yield high quality results that will help you stand out when compared to other self-publishers and make the entire cover creation process easier for your designer. This video attempts to explain the principles of proper cover design. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• The recommended design process of the course is based on using inspiration. So all of your covers should be based on something else, not completely unique and different.

• To get your cover design go on amazon and look for related books on your topic. Select 3 or 4 of these books that you like and use them as inspiration for your cover.

  • Save the links to the covers and send the links your cover designer as inspiration and say to make a new cover based on these covers but make it different.

• Ways for your designer to make covers different are:

  • Using different color schemes

  • Using different fonts

  • Different backgrounds or patterns or stock photos

  • etc.

• When selecting books as your inspiration always select books that are NOT self-published. This is will give you work an extremely professional quality.

• Using inspiration for your entire cover design process makes work easier for your designer because most of the creative aspect is removed from the process and basing your covers on non-self-published books will help your works to stand out.

• Light covers sell better than darker covers, this is anecdotal, but tends to hold true.

• Always prefer simple, elegant, minimal, professional covers, over cluttered designs just seeking to get attention, this is anecdotal as well but tends to work well long term.

This video will attempt to explain everything you will need to know when hiring writers and cover designers. It will present some advanced tactics that help you get better job applicants and also help to you to manage your team better. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

One of the hardest parts of getting started will be building your first team. In the beginning you may not get the best workers that is a part of outsourcing and you have to keep searching for the good people.

• You will most likely experience the event of sending work to someone who you thought was enthusiastic only to find them go missing after the work has been properly assigned.

  • To deal with this try to follow-up with the worker daily or bi-daily. If the person takes a week or longer then you should end the contract and re-assign the work.

• Always put a simple question in your job ad to see who is actually reading and following directions and attention to detail i.e.

  • What color is the sky?

  • How many fingers does a human have?

• If someone does not answer the question. Deny them and tell them they didn’t have attention to detail and should apply again when / if the job is re-posted.

• When hiring a cover designer you are looking for someone that is good with photoshop. This is the most important thing. You do not have to impressed the cover designer’s work you just need to know that the person is good with photoshop.

  • A person with good photoshop skills can make a replica of anything, book covers, magazine covers, etc. Our design process is based on inspiration so it is important your designer knows all the tools photoshop has to offer well.

• Make sure that the person you hire as your cover designer is okay with variation i.e they are okay with doing revisions if you do not like their work.

  • Do not make a person waste time and do 5 revisions for each cover because of being indecisive.

  • You do not need the perfect cover. It is better to publish something and see the response then meaning if the book sells like the other books then keep publishing new things if the response to the book is poor then go back and try to fix the book.

• Make it clear to cover designer that for every cover they design for you they must deliver a .JPG version of the cover and the .PDF version of the cover.

  • .JPG will be used for kindle

  • .PDF will be used for Createspace

• Your workflow with the cover designer should be the following: The designer should make an initial version of the cover using watermarked images. Then send the initial designs to you for review. You should request changes, then buy the stock photos and send them to your cover designer to make the final versions of the covers and upload them.

  • The workflow is create a mockup version of the cover. You give feedback. You send the stock photos. Your designer uploads the final versions i.e. .JPG and .PDF.

• Always use stock photos for your covers do not use free pictures from online.

• Try to avoid making changes in covers because you do not want to make the design process longer than it needs to be.

• When hiring a writer you want to stick to the following countries: Kenya, Philippines, and Pakistan. These countries will provide the most value for your dollars. Prefer Kenya because the written English, in my experience is almost as good if not better, then writing you will get in the United States.

• Always get a writing sample from your writer before you hire them. Remember that what you will receive is their best work. So inspect it closely. If you find a lot of errors do not hire them. But remember that you will most likely still find errors because English is not the person’s 2nd So do not disqualify someone because you find an error. You are looking for very good not perfect.

• Make it very clear to whoever you hire that plagiarism will not tolerated and that EVERYTHING they write must be their own work. EVERYTHING. Nothing can come from online not even properly cited quotes.

  • Tell them you will check everything for plagiarism and that you will proofread their work BEFORE you pay them. Make them agree to this.

• Always pay your team quickly. Do not play games with money. If you check their work for plagiarism and you proofread and everything is good. Pay them, do not delay.

  • You want your workers to see that you are serious and if they complete your assignments correctly they can make money.

    • Once you workers understand this they will work harder for you because they know the money is consistent and reliable and you are trustworthy.

  • (Proofreading is covered in next module).

  • Always leave good feedback for people who hire on upwork.

    • This will make the person give you good feedback and make your profile look perfect. A good looking profile will attract better workers, and allow you be more aggressive with how much you are willing to pay for certain tasks.

In this video you will given actionable steps to complete module 4. Make sure to complete these steps BEFORE moving on to the next module. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Use the job descriptions to hire a writer and cover designer.

• As you wait for applicants and interview people you should be looking on amazon for inspiration for your first set of covers.

Follow along in this video to learn the proper process for getting your book covers designed. Using Amazon and related books in your niche you will see the process of finding covers that you like which look professional to use as inspiration for your books. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Only select non-self-published  books as your inspiration. You want your books to have a very professional feel.

This video will attempt to introduce you to the idea of book titles and how to properly think about them. Book titles have a very strategic purpose in self-publishing and they must be given a proper amount of attention and thought. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Title of a book is two parts. It has a title and a subtitle. It can also have a series which is a phrase that can link multiple books.

• Both the title and subtitle of a book should be seen as a marketing tactic when you are publishing books.

• Before you choose a title for your book you should go on amazon and type keywords related to your book to find related keywords that people are actually searching. The title you select for your book should match one of these keywords.

• You should try to also put keywords in the subtitle as well.

• Do not try to be creative in your title. Creative should be left for the subtitle. A proper title should be the exact keyword you targeting. A word that people are specifically searching on amazon.

• The goal when selecting a title is when someone types a keyword related to your book you want your book to be at the top of the search results in amazon on the first page of results.

• If you make your book permanently you book will most show up on the first page of the amazon results usually for the main keyword you are targeting in your title. And this main keyword should be the topic of your book.

• Make sure to re-target the same keyword from the title in your subtitle and also try to target other keywords in the subtitle.

• Do not be afraid to have a long subtitle because you are targeting multiple keywords your cover designer should be able to properly design the cover so your long subtitle is not noticeable.

This video will attempt to discuss book length and how long a properly self-published book should be. The ideal length of a book depends on many things and these idea will be addressed throughout the video. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• The longer a book is the better.

• People particularly like books that are at least 100 pages i.e. 90 to 100, 110, 120.

• But in the beginning publish smaller books to get more books out there with your initial investment. Once you have your initial set of books you would re-invest the royalties back into the business and start to publish larger books.

• So overall the idea is publish larger books as you grow. When you making consistent royalties i.e. 1K 2K 3K try to spend a little more and make larger books.

• Also take note of the response of people. If a 5K word books gets you good feedback you might not need to do 10K word books.

• Start with 3K word books, get your first set of books out there, get the royalties coming in, Lord willing, then work your way up to larger books like 10K word or larger.

• When you trying to do larger books you need people who can actually really write so starting with 3K and working up will allow you find those people who can actually write and create that much content.

This video attempts to introduce the idea of adding a relevant resource to the end of your books that will add more value and increase the size of your books easily. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• All the links that your writers used when doing the research for creating a book should be listed on a page called the works cited page or resources page.

• The links should be listed with the associated page titles and these pages of links should place at the back of every book.

• The reason you do this, is because when people get to the end of the book they will click on some of the links and continue reading about the subject of the book. So this adds more value for the reader in the kindle / digital version of your books. In the print version of your books these pages of links will add more pages to your book.

• For every topic that you mention in your outline the writer should start by researching that topic and finding links these links should be saved along with the associated page titles of the webpage and this document of links should ultimately become your works cited page.

• An easy way to check in with your writers is to ask for the works cited page and see how much research they have completed.

This video will attempt to guide you through the important task of assigning your first set of tasks to have your first books written and your first covers designed. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• To actually physically outsource the work of writing you should send your outline to your writer and set a deadline of about 7 days to for the work to be completed.

• 7 days is adequate for a book that is anywhere from 3K to 6K words. If your books are longer than this you might want to consider giving your writers more time to complete everything.

• Whenever you send out the outlines for your books to be written you want to simultaneously send out the inspiration for your covers to your cover designer.

  • You want to get back all the work at the same time or around the same time so once you move on to next steps in publishing the book you do not have to wait for work to be completed or be waiting for changes.

• After you assign the work you always want to check in with your workers. To keep them on track. Email them every day or every two days and just ask how is it going to make sure they are working every day.

• If you are going to write yourself you should use the outline the exact way that you instruct your writer to use the outline meaning you should go topic and topic and find links that explain each topic. You should read what you find, get an understanding of the topic, then you should write about the topic. You should do this for every topic then make it all flow together.

• Set a daily writing goal like 500 words or 1000 words. And you want to keep writing each day until you hit that goal. After you have read about a topic and you set your goal and ready to write. Just write. Do not proof read, do not re-read what you are writing, do not think so much about what you are saying. Just write and keep writing until you hit the goal.

  • Proof read your writing later just hit your daily writing goal. This is the best way to get longer writing project done.

  • Always write as fast as you possible can, like you were racing to get it done and hit the amount of words you want to write for the day.

• The way you proofread is not, as you write. You should proofread after you finish your daily go you come back to it. You can even come back to proofread days later, as long as you are hitting your daily writing goal. Do not break your concentration or flow by proofreading.

In this video you will given actionable steps to complete module 5. Make sure to complete these steps BEFORE moving on to the next module. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Send your outline and inspiration to your cover designer for your first set of books and set due dates.

• Fund your depositphotos account and start paying monthly for the service so you can get your covers designed properly.

• Make sure that follow up with workers consistently, and you keep checking to keep on track to meeting the deadline.

  • Ask your writers to show their research.

• Make sure that you set deadlines for yourself as well if you are going to try and write yourself. Make sure also to set daily goals.

Follow along in this video to learn the role of the Amazon search bar in your business. When you start typing in the search bar Amazon will recommend keywords that people are searching related to what you are typing. These recommendations are very valuable. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Amazon search bar is very important in your self-publishing business. You will need to use the recommendation generated by the search in selecting your book titles, subtitles, and keywords.

Follow along in this video while a book blurb or amazon product description is written. Remember one of the most important parts of the blurb is the section where the reader is introduced to the different topics he will learn. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Make sure that you read the entire book before you try to write a book blurb. The book should have also been proof read.

• Remember to consult your outline when writing the book blurb as well to remind yourself the most important aspects

• Every book blurb should have a section called "Here Are Some of the Things You Will Learn in this Book:"

  • This should be styled with a heading 2 i.e h2 tag to make the font bigger.

Follow along in this video to learn how to add styles to your amazon product descriptions. Basic HTML will be discussed to change the visual appeal of your descriptions and draw attention to certain sections. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Book blurbs and amazon product descriptions are the same thing. To get styling in the blurb use basic HTML tags.

In this video you will be introduced the concept of "Good Enough". You will learn that completing tasks is better than delaying them for the sake of trying to be perfect. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• When you are dealing with outsourced work and trying to succeed in self-publishing. Remember the concept of “Good Enough”.

• This means: Do let yourself get paralyzed with trying to be perfect.

• If you find yourself disliking everything that you are getting, it could be that you running into a stream of bad writers but more likely you trying to be a bit too perfect and your standard are a bit too high.

• It’s better to publish something with errors then fix it later then to never publish it because you are trying to be perfect or you never actually finish the work.

• As long as your work is error free for the most part and has correct grammar this is enough.

• Get your work back, proof read it, improve the sentence structure then publish it and move on. This business is about scaling with a certain level of quality it is not about being perfect.

• You need a lot of books in your account to reach higher incomes and there will naturally be errors in your books when you are publishing at this scale.

• Cover design is really an area where you need to understand “Good enough”. If you try to like and love every cover you will never publish anything.

• If what’s given to you looks similar to the inspiration, its professional, and clean then publish it and see what happens. Do not waste time.

• Its better to publish something and see the response in sales of the book. This is especially true after you have some books on your account and have an idea of how much money you make per book. Publish books and see how they sell. If the book sells as much the others move on, even if you do not like the cover. If the response is poor you might want to re-design it. But remember that publishing more books is more important than making sure everything is perfect.

Quality control in self-publishing is extremely important. An important aspect of controlling quality is introduced in this video: proofreading. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• One of the most important aspects of having long term staying power in self-publishing is to control quality.

• Everything you publish must be proofread because nothing you get back from your writers will be perfect and by proof reading you can significantly improve quality.

• In the beginning at least for the first 6 months you should be doing all the proof reading yourself.

• When you are first starting out you should know what you are publishing. By proofreading you understand your books and it will make it easier for you to write book blurbs.

• Long term feedback to your workers and sticking with some people over the long term will naturally improve the writing ability of your team because they will be doing the same thing over and over.

• The first step in proofreading is to check for plagiarism.

• It is very important in the beginning to check for plagiarism. After 4 or 5 assignments from the same person you plagiarism checks can be much less extensive.

• Amazon will let you published plagiarized content from the internet but you should avoid this at all costs. Make sure your writers are re-writing everything your books.

  • No quotes can be put in a book even with proper citation. Everything in the book must be unique from your writer’s head.

• When you are publishing book you want to own the copyright to that work and only way you can own the work is for everything to be unique.

• When you strict about this from the beginning most people will listen and will not take any work from online.

• After you check for plagiarism you should read the book from beginning to end.

• It should only take a few hours to read your books and it will make a huge difference in the quality of the work that you publishing when compared others who will not proofread.

• The first thing you want to check for when proofreading is spelling mistakes, these will typically underlined red or blue in MS word. You want to correct these first.

• As read from beginning to end you want to try and make the English flow better by correcting sentence structure and fixing grammar.

• Also if find this problem of articles missing like “the”, “a”, “an”. You should tell your writers to use the word “the” much more than they think they need. This is not feel natural to them but this will make a big difference in the flow of the English.

• Point out repeated errors clearly in emails and continue to point them out. You will see your writer’s quality improve over time. Also be nice when you point things out and always be positive.

Building your team in the beginning stages of self-publishing will be a challenging tasks and sometimes you will receive bad work when outsourcing. This video will attempt to teach you some methods for saving this work so you can get value from everything you outsource. 

Important Facts From this Lesson

• Always try your best to save any work you outsource meaning do not outsource something then delete it or not use it for something.

• If the work is bad try to go into overdrive i.e. spend more hours proofreading and fixing English to try and save the work.

• If you can’t fix the book you want to delete the bad sections of the books and keep the good sections.

• Oftentimes you will find that when a book is bad. A majority of the book is bad, not everything. There are still some sections that you can keep.

• Re-assign the book, and once the writer is finished writing add the sections you saved from the bad book. You can also send the sections to the writer after they are done writing and have them add the work in themselves.

• When re-assigning bad work never send a bad book to writer and fix to fix it. Always just reassign the work from the beginning like you never received the bad work.

• Trying to fix bad work will take more effort then starting from the beginning.

• If you cannot save the work and everything is bad. Then you want to break the book up into articles and use it as blog posts or inspiration for blog posts. You can also use the articles as inspiration for emails.

• You can also give the book away for free in exchange for an email address.

• The final option is to sell the articles as PLR on fiverr.com for $5.00.

A book blurb is essentially a product description. It is intended to help sell your book by explaining to readers what they will learn when purchasing your book. Methods of writing book blurbs are introduced in this video. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Before you can publish your book and after it has been formatted you have to create a book blurb.

• A book blurb is essentially the sales copy for the book that will show up in the amazon produce description page.

• Your blurb should be at a minimum 1 or 2 paragraphs with an additional section that outline exactly what the ready will learn in the book.

  • In this section you are going to list as many facts that the reader will learn by purchasing your book.

    • These statements are called bullets.

• The same blurb that you use for kindle will also be used for print books but you will add some extra styles.

• You can write your book blurbs yourself or you can have you writer make the blurb for you.

• You should create the blurb yourself because you should understand what is important about the book and you have the most incentive to write something good.

• If you have your writer create the blurb for you. The way to do this is instruct your writer to write a 2 paragraph summary of the most important aspects of the book after they finish writing the book.

• You will take these two paragraphs then add a section with bullets and use this as your book blurb.

• Your blurbs should be written in Microsoft word then proofread. After the book is proofread you should paste the blurb into a text editor like notepad so you can apply formatting styles.

Formatting a book is applying styling to the word document to improve readability in digital and print versions of the book. This video will attempt to introduce you to the topic of formatting and what are the most important things when formatting a self-published book. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• After proofreading your book you have to format the work.

• Formatting is the process setting the styles in the document so that the book is ready for viewing either digitally or printed.

• There is two steps to formatting:

  • The first step is formatting the work for digital viewing i.e. for kindle.

  • The second step is to format the book for print viewing i.e. Createspace.

• You also format for kindle before you format for Createspace. Because the process for formatting for kindle has more steps that the process of formatting for print.

• Avoid trying to draw attention to any of your text when styling a book for kindle.

• All kindle books need a table of contents and the table of contents should be clickable.

• Kindle books always should have heading you should never just increase the font size.

• The font size of your entire kindle book should be 14 pt.

• When putting content on a new page you press CRTL+ENTER to enter a page break do not repeatedly press enter.

• Setting the document size of kindle eBooks is very important and should match the trim size of the print books.

• Line spacing in your kindle books should be set to 1.15 and your font should be Arial for the entire book.

• Formatting for print i.e. for Createspace is simpler that formatting for kindle.

• The most important thing for your print books is that the overall document should be saved as a .PDF.

  • The book should have pages, a table of contents with page numbers, and the font for the entire book should be Georgia 12pt with headings.

In this video you will be introduced the most important things to remember when uploading your books to the different publishing platforms. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• The important thing when uploading to KDP is the categories and picking proper ones.

• When you select a category for your book any person that browses those particular categories can find your book if they browse through enough pages.

• For example if your book is placed into the computer programming category. People can go to this category and click through pages and pages of books placed into the category automatically by amazon.

  • The higher up your book is in the search results the better, selecting relevant categories will help with getting higher in the ranks.

• Amazon always you to pick two categories but if you email them ask, they will place your book into a third category.

• When uploading to KDP you can 7 search keywords and you should make sure that these words are relevant to the book. To find your keywords never just brainstorm use the amazon search recommendations to select your keywords.

• Most of the ranking for your book will come from the information that you put in the KDP version.

• The most important thing with Createspace is your pricing. Most of money you make per month will come print book sales.

  • You should price your book based on the number of pages. If your book is less than 100 pages then your book should be priced so that you make 2.00 in royalties. If your book is over 100 pages then your book should be priced so that you earn 3.00 in royalties.

• When pricing your digital books i.e. KDP always price your books at 2.99. Do not try and do .99 pricing this does not work.

• If you find that all the books on your given book topic are .99 you should price your book at 2.99. If you get no sales and a lot of returns then you should make the sales permanently free.

• At 2.99 you will make 2 dollars for every sale. If your book is set to .99 you will make .30 cents. You can build a business on .30 cents.

• Always put all your books into KDP select. By putting your book in select you can publish the digital version of the book on any other platforms besides amazon.

  • Being in select will allow you to make the book free for 5 days.

  • After your book is published you should set the book to free for 5 days.

  • Make the book free from Tuesday to Saturday this will give you most sales on Sunday usually. Sunday is the day when you the most amount people are reading kindle books.

In this video you will given actionable steps to complete Section 7. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• At this point your writing and covers should be assigned to your workers in the last module. You want to get this work back from your workers. Get for plagiarism, pay workers, proof read their work, and fix any mistakes.

• Get the final versions of your covers

• Format your books and write your book blurbs.

• Upload the books to KDP and Createspace

• Once the books have been uploaded you set the book to free promo.

• Now write outlines for the next books to be published next week.

• Repeat the entire process ad infinitum. Continue to repeat this process until you reach your goals.

Congrats on publishing your first book or set of books. Now let's talk about your focus for the future. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• After you have published your set of books you want to get ready to start churning.

• Mechanically publish books for the next 6 months and hit your weekly goal.

• If you set your goal of 2 books per week or 4 books you should pretend you’re a robot and hit that goal each week.

Follow along in this video to watch a book be formatted for digital reading i.e. watch how to format a book for kindle. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Remember to set your font type and font sizes.

  • Font Type: Arial

  • Font Size: 14pt

• It is very important to avoid trying to draw attention to any section of your writing in a kindle version of a book.

• Use section headings and page breaks throughout your document. Never repeatedly press the ENTER key or make the font bigger.

Follow along in this video to watch a book be formatted for digital reading i.e. watch how to format a book for kindle.

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Remember to set your font type and font sizes.

  • Font Type: Arial

  • Font Size: 14pt

• It is very important to avoid trying to draw attention to any section of your writing in a kindle version of a book.

• Use section headings and page breaks throughout your document. Never repeatedly press the ENTER key or make the font bigger.

Follow along in this video to watch a book be formatted for digital reading i.e. watch how to format a book for kindle. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Remember to set your font type and font sizes.

  • Font Type: Arial

  • Font Size: 14pt

• It is very important to avoid trying to draw attention to any section of your writing in a kindle version of a book.

• Use section headings and page breaks throughout your document. Never repeatedly press the ENTER key or make the font bigger.

Follow along in this video to watch a book be formatted for digital reading i.e. watch how to format a book for kindle. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Remember to set your font type and font sizes.

  • Font Type: Arial

  • Font Size: 14pt

• It is very important to avoid trying to draw attention to any section of your writing in a kindle version of a book.

• Use section headings and page breaks throughout your document. Never repeatedly press the ENTER key or make the font bigger.

Follow along in this video to watch a book be formatted for print publication i.e. watch how to format a book for createspace. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Remember to set your font type and font sizes.

  • Font Type: Georgia

  • Font Size: 12pt

• Remember to add page numbers to the document and also add page numbers to the table of contents.

Follow along in this video to watch a book be formatted for print publication i.e. watch how to format a book for createspace. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Remember to set your font type and font sizes.

  • Font Type: Georgia

  • Font Size: 12pt

• Remember to add page numbers to the document and also add page numbers to the table of contents.

Follow along in this video to see how a book is properly published for digital publication with the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Setting proper categories and keywords for kindle book when uploading them to KDP is the important thing to remember.

• Make sure you watch the follow along video on using amazon search recommendation to see how to find relevant keywords properly.

Follow along in this video to see how a book is properly published for print publication with the createspace platform. 

Important Facts From this Lesson:

• Pricing your books for print publication is the important thing to remember when uploading to createspace.

  • You should be earning $2.00 in royalties if your book is less than 100 pages. $3.00 in royalties if your book is larger than 100 pages.