Editing Sucks & Phase II Update

I'm halfway, yes only halfway, through my first edit of my first kindle ebook, and it sucks! Editing is definitely my weakness in this process. You would think that it would actually go faster than writing, but so far it's taking me longer. I'm pretty sure I've already put in close to the same amount of time editing as I did to writing the initial first draft.

This is one task that I will immediately hire out when I start making money and can afford it! It has, however, been great for pushing me towards getting over my procrastination problem. I've always been bad about putting off the tasks that I don't like or want to do until "tomorrow", or, you know, next year. Sometimes, never! This time I've managed to keep myself on task pretty well, and I'm quite proud of this fact.

A couple things I've been doing is when I have something I want to do, like read, and something I need to do (but don't want) like editing; I make myself do the editing first. So if I mess around and waste a lot of time doing the unpleasant task, then I don't leave any time for the thing I want to do. I've also quit labeling myself as a procrastinator. As in saying, "I'm a procrastinator." While it is important to acknowledge your weaknesses so that you can begin to work on them, it can easily become a crutch as well. A cop out if you will.

By labeling myself as one thing it's like saying that it is an unchangeable part of my identity. Like saying, I'm a woman. If I say that I have a procrastination problem though, then it's suddenly not so set in stone. A problem has a solution, and a problem can be fixed. This all ties into my last post where I talked about changing my state of mind, and taking the time to improve myself as a person and not just focusing on the business aspect of things. Still, editing sucks!

Of course part of the reason that editing has been taking so long is that I've been making myself take it slow. Reading each line slowly once, out loud, making any edits, then reading it again. Yes, this is tedious, and boring, and takes a long time. However, I'm doing it this way to fight my urge rush through this unpleasant task and in the process do a substandard job. I want to deliver quality content to my future readers, and they deserve a well written and edited book. In return they'll hopefully pay me (of course!) and recommend my books to others, because the ultimate compliment would be to know that I helped them enough they were willing to endorse my products to the people that trust them. Editing was only part of Phase II two though, the other was formatting and email blogging.

I'm happy to say that with the little ebooklet KDP supplied for free I powered through formatting in around 1 hour. Since I had read the beginning of the book to start with some things I had already done as I was writing and this saved me a bunch of time. If you plan on self publishing through KDP I highly suggest you do the same thing. As far as my email blogging plan to pre-write around 10 emails, I haven't gotten very far.

I took the time to read book called the Email Marketing Blueprint, by Steve Scott and it really helped me focus on what I'd be doing in my email blogging campaign. From there I've decided that I actually need around 15 emails to start with, and so far I've written one. I outlines, roughly, what kinds of emails I would send, when I would send them, and how many would be monetized and HOW they would be monetized. I need to clean up my rough outline though and go into more detail in it. Once this is done it should be easier for me to knock out the emails I want to get written to start.

Usually when I sit down to start pre writing the emails my brain goes blank. Then I flounder around in my notes and research until I stop and start on editing instead. We all know already how I feel about editing, so this shows how much I'm struggling with this. A better outline should help me focus on the core things I want to write about, and how I want to write about them. The pre written emails for the email blogging is probably going to spill over into Phase III.

Phase III is a bit murkier for me, as it will include the finally product and getting that product published. Here's a general idea of what it will entail though:

1. A final edit - yes I'm going to edit again!
2. Finishing the initial wave of pre-written emails
3. Setting up my email service and getting the email blogging campaign set up.
4. Transferring my word document into the KDP publishing
5. Checking for bugs in my formatting, especially paying close attention to my links. 
6. Making any formatting changes that are needed so that everything is clean and works.
7. Finishing up the final product, including the cover.
8. Publishing
9. Launching a free release and trying to market my free ebook
10. Watch the results closely, and take notes.
11. Switch to a paid product @ a $2.99 price point and again take notes.

I suppose that launching the book, and tracking the results of my downloads is really a kind of Phase IV now that I think about it. Likely I'll break that down into it's own separate Phase once I get to that point. I also know what book I'm going to write next as a kind of companion to this book, and I've already started a very rough outline. Likely during one of the last two phases I will finish my outline, and hopefully begin writing again. 

The good news is by the time I start writing the next book it should be close to my breaks between semesters in school. This should allow me around two months to focus on getting the second book written, finished and published. The second one will be probably be smaller than this first one, so I'm thinking the price on it will be more like $1.99. As you can see I'm already thinking a few steps ahead on everything.

So there's the update on my progress. If you have any specific questions about anything just leave a comment and I'm happy to try and answer it for you! 

Changing My State of Mind: Why It's Important

I've mentioned before that I've been trying a lot of different ways to make money, specifically online, for the past few years. Probably around 3 at least, seriously for about 2 years. I've learned a lot during that time, about blogging, selling, buying, business, etc. I've devoured books and blog posts on these subjects and kept an ear to the ground for new opportunities all the time. Yet, I haven't actually managed to succeed the way I want to. I've had some small successes, but my ultimate goal of working for myself and being able to work from home. Maybe you've been doing the same thing, and maybe, like me, you're starting to wonder what you're doing wrong.

I mean, other people are doing these things, like blogging and selling on Ebay, and they're doing well. They've managed to succeed and accomplish their dreams, so why can't I? I know I'm not dumb, and I know that I've done the research on this stuff. So there must be an elusive something that I'm missing. These are some of the thoughts that were rattling around in my brain this past year or more. They were sucking away at my confidence and resolve, and tempting me into just quitting the whole thing and sticking with the 9 to 5 grind forever. But.......... I just couldn't ever get it out of my mind, this siren call of online marketing.

I kept checking the blogs, and reading free ebooks on my Kindle, listening to podcasts and so much more. While I still haven't realized my goals, yet, there's been shift these past few months, and it's been with my mind set. There is a sense of confidence now that I was lacking before, and a willingness to push myself, and work really hard where before I couldn't/wouldn't. So what's changed?

Nothing very much, and everything at once. All along I would read posts and such and sometimes the authors or bloggers would talk about books that inspired them. Most blogs have a resources, or must read section on their blog, that will list different books they've read and services they've used. I've read quite of few of them over the years myself, but they've always been the books that were about the business end of things. Not the mental end, and one of the biggest things I've learned this past year is having the right state of mind is crucial to, well, everything.

The honest truth is that towards the beginning of the year, starting around Spring time, I was in a terrible place. I was angry, and unhappy, and I took a lot of that out on the people around me. I felt so much bitterness, and helplessness, and just anger and sadness that I didn't recognize myself anymore. That just isn't like me, I've always been resilient, happy, easy going and ready to keep moving forward. Somewhere though, I had lost all my spunk and was just running on fumes.

Realizing that this was not good, and that this was not the kind of person I wanted to be, I turned once again to blogs and books to help me find a better state. I became interested in meditation, which I still don't do, I just can't sit still that long, but that lead into a fun ride that led to a book called Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I've seen this book recommended o many times, by such varied people that I finally caved and bought it. Okay, the truth is that I've only read half, and to warn you there is some kind of new age stuff in this book.

Don't let that deter you though, because this book also talks a lot of habits, and thoughts. Through this book I realized that while I worked on growing my knowledge of the nuts and bolts of online businesses, I was not taking the time to learn how to be successful. I'm not talking about monetary successes, or business, I'm talking personally. I need to learn how to allow myself to fail, how to continue to push myself, and just improve myself in general. This, I think, is the elusive something that I had been missing. The fact is that my mind was never really in the right place for me to succeed at this stuff. Since reading that book I've read many others that deal a little more with the abstracts of business rather than the solid and real.

When I started writing my kindle book I decided that not only would I read books about how to sell your ebook, and start an email list, but also on good writing habits, and creating better habits. I think it's because of that fact that I focused on both the project and my own state that I managed to finish the rough draft, and I'm currently about a 1/3 of the way through Phase II. It's because of what I've learned that I've mostly been able to consistently post to this blog and keep up with it, when in the past I didn't.

Taking to the time to learn some self improvement is NOT a waste of time. When I started out I would read suggestions by people for this book or that book and when I realized it was a "lifestyle" type book, one that was more about HOW to live than how to make money; I would just stop. I kept thinking that when I was making more money I'd take the time to read those books. I couldn't see that investing in myself was even more valuable than investing in a domain name or website. So while I realize I still have a long way to go; I also realize I've come a long ways as well.

The point of all this is that you shouldn't ignore your own personal growth while pursuing your business. Learning how to grow and improve as a person is the single best investment you can make. There is a very definite state of mind that entrepreneurs need, and you ARE an entrepreneur even if you're blogging, to succeed at their goals and live their dreams. It's tough to start and build your own business, no matter the kind, and it's even tougher to keep going sometimes. Your state of mind, or attitude, or whatever you want to call it, is what will carry you through all the tough times.

I know I'm not "successful" yet, and that I'm still not working from home. Again though, I can feel the change this time. This time I feel far more confident in myself, and it's probably because I've been proving myself, to myself. I've managed to keep myself on task better, complete projects, and procrastinate less. My mood has improved and I'm less likely to become easily discouraged and not want to continue working. I'm still not perfect at these things, but I'm still working on myself to get better and better with them. Especially the procrastination/laziness thing!

So if you decide to go down this journey for yourself please don't ignore your own self improvement on the way. You ARE your business, and fail or succeed, it's all on your shoulders and decisions. The investment in yourself is one of the cheapest and easiest you can make for your business, and it can have the most profound effect on it. Don't make the mistake I did and ignore yourself thinking it's not important. It is important, just as much as all that technical stuff you need to learn about to. There are so many blogs, and great ebooks that you can read on the subject to help you. Don't waste a few years chasing your tail like me, be smart and learn from my mistakes.

Thoughts On Selling Books Through Amazon FBA

If you've been following this blog than you know that I'm pretty focused on selling books through Amazon FBA. I have a few reasons for this:

• Low Sourcing Cost
• Higher Return on Investment (ROI)
• Little to No Long Term Storage Fees
• Easy For Me To Source

Those are the top reasons reasons I want to sell books on Amazon fba, and there are a lot of people who make a good living selling nothing but used books on Amazon. Now, if you start to research selling books at all you'll see a lot of people talk about the sales rank of books. Specifically, you'll see a lot of people talking about how they never buy a book with a rank under 1 million. Why? 

Well, let's go into sales rank a little on Amazon. First off it's a number that Amazon assigns an item that, supposedly is an indicator of how well and how fast an item will sell. I say supposedly because frankly, no one really knows exactly how Amazon figures sales rank, and they are keeping that secret tighter than Fort Knox. While no one other than them knows the exact algorithm they use to figure sales rank, it is a decent indicator of how well an item will sell. General wisdom is anything above 1 million will NOT sell fast. So the thought is they don't want to "waste" their time and money buying, and listing these books. I personally have a couple problems with this "general wisdom".

The first is that, as mentioned above, there are no long term storage fees for unique items on FBA. That means if you only have one of an item, like one book, than they aren't going to charge you those extra fees. So, you're not incurring extra fees by having the inventory sitting around. Besides, it's not like it's sitting around your house taking up space. They're sitting in a nice Amazon warehouse, safe and sound, and out of your sight. 

The next is that while you may not sell the book fast, chances are you WILL sell it eventually. It just isn't going to be a "quick" (as in under a month) sale. It may be in 3 month, 6 months, or a year later. However, who cares! You're not incurring those extra fees, although you are paying normal storage fees still, and if you bought the book cheap enough, you're still going to make a profit. Likely a good one at that. I'm sure that eventually you will have to choose to destroy some books because they just don't sell, but again, likely the majority will sell. Eventually.

Now I'm not telling you to rush out and buy every book you find with a rank that's above 1 million and send it in. I still think it's smart to have a healthy selection of books with a rank below 1 million that will, hopefully, be fast sellers. The thing is, you're building a business here, and any business has a long term and short term profit strategy. In my mind the 1 million and under books are the "short" term profits, they're the books you're going to send and hope to see sell within that first month. To me though, those books that are 1 million and above, those are the long term profits. These books are the extra profit padding each month. It's just going to take you awhile to start seeing those profits. But if you continued to source consistently over the course of a few months, and then hopefully years, you'll see those numbers continue to grow and grow each month as more and more long tail items (above 1 milion) sell. 

My strategy, and obviously I'm not an expert (yet), is to buy books with a "good" rank for quick sales so I can funnel my profits back into buying more inventory AND buy books with "bad" rank ( above 1 million and under 3 million) and patiently wait for them to begin selling. It seems to me that leaving those "bad" ranked books on the table is just like taking money out of your wallet and leaving it on that same proverbial table. Recently, on a blog I follow I had my theory somewhat proven.

I'm signed up for the emails from a website called booktothefuture.com and a few months ago he went to a book sale, and bought a large amount of books. Many of these books had a rank above 1 million, clear to 6 million. He recently published an update on his little experiment with buying so many badly ranked, you can read it HERE. It's really quite interesting, and while I won't go into all the details, if you want to read them just follow the link above. What interested me was the sales of the books above 1 million.

The gist of it is that 30% of the books that he sold over the last five months, from this one sale, were books with a rank above 1 million. A couple were even 5 and 6 million ranked. His profit from the books from that sale that sold was around $725, now 30% of that is around $217. For some people that may not seem like a big number, but you have to remember is that this is from 1 book sale this person attended.

You know that he's attended and sourced far more than just that one sale. That means that if he were to continue to buy those 1 million and above books, and they continued to contribute and 30% to his sales than it's easy to add more and more money to that pot. There are of course other factors to consider, many of which we can't know.

We can't know how many books that he will eventually have to choose to destroy because they aren't selling. We know how much he spent in total for all books, but we don't know how much the badly ranked books cost. Although I suppose you could just divide what he paid by how many books he bought total and get an average cost per book. Yet even with these things to consider I still think it's important to note what he found out in his experiment. Those extra "bad" books sold, and they sold fairly well. Adding an extra 30% to your sales is nothing to sneeze at.

So what I've taken away from this is that those "bad" books are a good investment, when used wisely. Again, I'm not going to rush out and buy nothing but badly ranked books, or even a large majority of badly ranked books. However, if there is a good profit margin, and there are only one or no other FBA sellers for that book, and it seems unique enough that it won't be easily sourced by other sellers, than yes, I'm going to buy it. I'm still looking for those books with a rank under a million, because again, I do need sales that are fairly quick so that I can continue to source for more books. Hopefully after a few months, let's say 6, I'll start to see more and more of those long tail books selling out of my inventory and padding my profits.

There is one more thing to consier with this strategy though, and I'm actually adding this section a couple months after writing this post. It's something I "missed" in my initial musings but have thought of since. That is the time you will spend sourcing books. If you are going for more books to sell, and more that are a higher Amazon ranking, than it's likely you will spend more time sourcing. Some people use this as the reason they won't buy anything above 1 million, and it's a legitimate reason. However, if you are scanning books you're probably going to come across a few of the "bad" ranked books along the way. A few quick seconds to check other sellers and profit margin and you can still add these books to your selling portfolio. So I can't really see how it would add that much time to what you are already doing. Especially in the beginning when you will be scanning tons of books until you start to get a feel for a "good" book to sell.

So there you go, my "strategy" for selling books on FBA. Buy the quick sales for more sourcing money, and buy the long tail books for higher sales down the road. I'll be sure to update you as I go along as to how well this is working for me, but obviously it's going to take a few months to realize. In the meanwhile you can chew over what we talked about and decide for yourself, are you only going to go for the books that are under a million in rank, or are you going to supplement your inventory with a selection of books that are above a million? Only you can decide that. If your curious about sales rank numbers for the different categories on Amazon and what's considered "good" than here's another good article I found that will give you a rough idea; just go here to check it out

Rough Draft Finished! Phase II Starting

I've finally finished the rough draft of my Kindle Ebook! Yay! I started writing it on the 7th of September and finished it on the 9th of October, so just a couple days longer than a month. I'm actually pretty proud of myself, even though this is just the rough first draft, I started and completed a project. My weakness continues to be my own habit of procrastination, but there were a few times I made myself work anyways (and a few times I didn't). Of course finishing up the rough draft means that I'm now enterig what I'm calling Phase II of writing this ebook. So we'll go over some rough numbers from the rough draft, and then a quick recap of what Phase II will look like.

First things first, lets go over some numbers from the rough draft.

• It took me a little over a month to complete it
• However, I actually only wrote for 11 of those days
• The average time to write was 2 hours, with the longest being 3 hours and the shortest only 1 hour
• Total Hours Spent Writing - aprox. 16 hours
• Average amount of words typed - 2,000 words
• Final Word Count - 24,405

To be fair I can type pretty quickly, so that does account for the fact that I could average 2,000 words each time. Once I hit around 4,000 words written in one session. The fact is that looking at the above stats there really isn't reason, except my wacky schedule, that the rough draft couldn't be completed in 10 - 14 days. Next book I think I'm going to shoot for a complete rough draft in 14 days. Again, this is a rough draft, which means that I did not stop to edit, add photos, do any formatting or anything like that. The point was to get the words out of my head and onto "paper". Which leads us to Phase II, which I think is going to take a lot more of my time than Phase I.

For a quick recap Phase II is:

• First editing of rough draft
• Formatting the book for Kindle
• Starting the creation of a Email Newsletter
• Creating a Squeeze Page for readers to sign up for my Newsletter

The first thing is pretty self explanatory. Now is when I'll start going through what I wrote and cleaning it up. Check spelling, and punctuation, and grammar and make sure what I wrote makes sense and flows well. I fully expect my final word count to drop after this initial edit as I suspect I repeated myself often. I also changed the layout of my book, so I need to go in and edit my table of contents and double check that chapter titles match what's written in the ToC. There are also a few photos that I need to create, edit and insert into the book. 

Either once I'm through with editing, or while I'm doing it I'll begin to format the book so that it is compatible with the Amazon Kindle publishing platform. Luckily for us Kindle Direct Publishing has published a small and FREE ebook called: Building Your Book for Kindle that tells you how to format your word document for Kindle Publishing. I started to read it just to see if it seemed overly complicated and what little I read seems fairly straight forward and they gave clear directions on completing it. It's also not a very large ebook, so hopefully that means that there's not a whole lot of formatting to be done :)

As you can see not everything in this phase is directly related to publishing a book on Amazon through Kindle. However, it's just as important to do correctly as it is to write a content filled ebook. In my last post I go into more detail about what I'll be doing in this phase and more about my email newsletter strategy. You can go here to read it if you'd like. Since then I have done a small bit of research into this, and squeeze pages, and what email service to use, and I found this great little article that explains (and labels) what I want to do much better than I did.

He calls is EMAIL BLOGGING and just click on those words if you want to read his post. If what I'm trying to do is intriguing to you he does do a great job of explaining it and how it's different from regular email marketing. Heck, it even helped clarify a few things in my mind about it all after reading it.

As I mentioned in my previous post I will write out the first 2 or 3 months worth of emails to have ready. I also read Steve Scott's ebooks on Amazon and he also has a great website called stevescottsite.com , again I highly recommend you read his website if you plan on trying to write for Kindle and if you want to have an email list to go with your books. He had some interesting articles on frequency of emails and such, so I think I'll try out his method, which will require me to write a few more than I had initially planned. However, we're talking an email here, so while the content must be quality it shouldn't be long winded. Short, sweet and to the point. Easier said than done for me. 

Lastly, I've decided that I will not be going with Mailchimp for my email service for one simple reason. They don't allow affiliate links in their email. Bummer. Considering that, other than promoting my own books and sales, my main monetization strategy will be the occasional affiliate recommendation. So, while Mailchimp is free, it's not going to work. So I'll be going with Aweber, which is highly recommended, and really isn't that badly priced, but I was trying to avoid spending anything out of pocket on this book. The good news is that they offer their first month for $1, and really what's $1 investment in a future business. After that it'll be $19.95 per month, of course they have special rates if you buy 3 months or 12 months, but for now monthly it'll have to be.

 I'm not going to sign up until right before I publish though. I'll write up my emails in Word and save them. That way I'll be starting that $1 trial as close as possible to when I may start to actually make money. I would sincerely hope I would at least make $20 in a month to at least pay for the email service. Of course there is a 60 day delay in payment for Kindle royalties, so I'm going to pay for that second month anyways. 

So there you go, finally made enough progress to move into Phase II. It seems like such a small list, this phase. Truthfully though it's slightly overwhelming to think of everything that has to go into this part. Still, if it's done correctly this time around much of this work I won't need to redo for every book. The email marketing is a one time thing, once it's all set u and ready to go then all I have to do is include the links to my squeezepage and let it go. So that's some good news. 

Honestly though I fully expect this phase to take a lot more work than the rough draft did! I will need to really push myself past my laziness and try to consistently work on this. It's the only hope I have to get it done before the month is over. It would be nice if the book was published early enough that I actually received payment for it this year. We'll see. Meanwhile I'll continue to take yo along with me as I stumble along and hopefully if you decide to ever do the same it'll help you out a little.