Greg Perry Self Publishing And Writing Interview Transcript
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BEN: Greg, how are you doing, my friend?
GREG: Ben, I’m doing great, I appreciate your talking to me today.
BEN: You really did help me a lot with that last book, and I just know there’s people out there who have the same questions that I had. Especially about ISBN numbers and all that sort of thing. But the first question I wanted to ask you is, I see a lot of books and tapes and writing courses that teach how to write book—and we’ll get into the marketing and publishing stuff later, but we want to start out with the actual craft—how did you learn how to write?
GREG: Well, that is interesting because I actually have never taken a writing course and I never learned how to write growing up in the government school system or anything. I was fortunate though that I was an avid reader. And I think being a reader is a prerequisite to being a good writer. Having said that, anyone can write books. And it’s okay if you need help, it’s okay actually—we’ll talk about this. You don’t even have to be a good writer to publish and sell a lot of books. As long as you got the knowledge of the subject and you want to write about it, you can transfer that knowledge to others and maybe have a ghost writer who’s skilled at putting words into a readable format. And you can turn you ideas and knowledge into an enjoyable book. But, really I would say that fiction is really the only area of writing that you yourself must be very good in before you’ll be successful.
And in the huge non-fiction arena of writing, your ideas, your information is far more important than the words that you might be able to put together. Very few autobiographies, for example, of famous people were actually penned by the people the book was about, yet it was their history, their ideas, their lives, their stories, even many of their words. But fortunately for me, I grew up reading a lot—and I mean a whole lot—so I do all my own writing. I couldn’t conceive of hiring someone to do my own writing. Perhaps at elance.com or someplace. But if I didn’t have the writing skills I would do that. So again, I didn’t take any course on writing. I think the primary problem with people who teach how to write and I’ve looked at many books on how to write, how to get a book published, I’ve looked at online writing courses, they’re not created by people who have had true success with writing. They may have self published something years ago when self publishing was really a vanity press market. Or they may have won some local writing award or they’ve written for their local newspaper, but really the number one way you become a good writer—as long as you have a reading background—is to write. And the more you write, the better you’ll become.
So in general I recommend you stay far away from writing courses. Unless the teacher or author or instructor of that course or that book has already proved him or herself. I give writing lectures sometimes at libraries and at the local I used to teach full time at—and the first thing I do sounds egotistical. I start off by telling my audience that I’ve written more than 80 books. And the first 70 of those or so were published by major publishers, all translated into every major language, sold in bookstores in almost every country on earth. And that doesn’t sound humble but I do not say it to brag but to me writing is just a business, it’s not a glamor thing, it’s just a business. I say it to encourage those who are listening to me that number one they can do the same, they can be successful. But most important it shows them that I practice what I teach. I’m not just telling you the things I myself haven’t done yet, or that I’ve read elsewhere. I only tell you what I have done first. And you learn how to write by doing a lot of it. The early things that I had published—ugh—I read them now they’re horrible. You’ll hear almost every writer on earth say that. And so I got better not through any course, but just by doing a lot of it. And I think that’s the best way for anyone to get better at it.
BEN: I know you write a lot of articles and things. Do you think maybe that’s a good way for someone just to start writing, just to maybe pick a subject and just start writing an article about it. And maybe it would become content later—but it also hones your craft?
GREG: I certainly do. Everything is content. Every article that you write, even if it’s for free it’s really not for free. It’s an investment in your time of learning your craft. And it’s an investment—a file you can later possibly reuse somehow in book form or as a chapter to a book or something like that. And the whole way you’re learning how to write, you’re getting feedback from people. People are going to write you—especially if it’s online—and tell you how it stinks. Or they may disagree with certain issues. Some of those disagreements you’ll understand and think, “Wow… they’re right. I should have said it that way.” Or… “That was dumb of me to say…” Or maybe you’ll just agree with all of it. And that’s fine too. I think that writers who are perceived as being writers don’t have an axe to grind but they certain have opinions. Even very popular fiction writers like Tom Clancy—he has very strict opinions about things. He is a black and white type of guy. And I think that as a writer if you get critiqued—both good and bad—in what you write about, I think that shows that you’re really touching some nerves in a good way.
BEN: Yeah, it’s almost like the more stronger the feedback or the opinion you get the more that you’re probably do right. I’m talking about from a technical point of view, but just from an opinionated point of view. You probably hit on something if you get some nasty…
GREG: Exactly. And I write a lot for a very popular website called lewrockwell.com and even though I don’t fully agree with their main theme, I’m in there with a lot of subjects, and the people that go to lewrockwell.com are very, very opinionated about everything single thing they think of. And that has been a good platform to hone my writing. Because there are many people who would be afraid to write for him. And for good reason. You really get some pretty major feedback even years later because he keeps your article on the site forever. So you should write as much as you can, every word that you can write. Write on as many sites as you can, write it in real magazines. If you think about a magazine editor’s job—and I’m not real big on going the traditional route of publishing anymore, even though the majority of my works have been published that way—if you look at a traditional magazine editor—first of all go to Barnes & Noble. You’ll see a thousand magazine titles every month. And most every one of those editors at the beginning of the month looks at blank paper and says, “How am I going to fill this month? What am I going to use this month?” And sure they’re inundated with articles also, but most of them aren’t that good. And so every editor has a blank slate that she or he must fill every month.
I think traditional magazines are a good way to get started. That’s how I first got started in writing. I was in college, and I just typed something on a piece of paper, I knew the subject which at the time was computers, and lo and behold a couple weeks later I had a check in the mail. And nobody told me how to get a magazine article published. I just wrote one and sent it in. And the truth is they are hungry for good articles every single month.
BEN: Kind of going back to what you were saying, everything is content that you write. So if you’re writing about something that you have an opinion on, or just anything I guess—forum posts or maybe in a reply email to someone—you could keep that and maybe repackage it and send it to a magazine?
GREG: You sure could. And you should. And you should listen to the replies that you get from other readers and possibly hone it some and change it some to make it even better and stronger.
BEN: It’s funny that you mention sending things into the magazines like that. Because I was recently talking to a guy named Michael Winicki and I was interviewing him for a book. And he said the same thing. He goes, try to get things into the regular magazines and trade publications. This was for purely promotional purposes as far as writing an article, but he said the feedback you’ll get you can’t get any better than that.
GREG: That’s true. And unlike websites, traditional magazines will send you a check. YOu won’t get rich off of it, but you’ll get paid in almost every case. And if you ever want to go the traditional route, a whole slew of magazine articles that you send to an acquisition editor shows that you can write, you can meet deadlines, that other people have approved of you. And that already makes you a writing expert in their eyes.
BEN: And again, people are already doing this when they’re writing forum posts or something—they just haven’t packaged it. So when it comes to writing for you—because you do so much writing it just blows me away when I see 80 books, I couldn’t even imagine it—are there days when you just don’t want to write… and how do you handle that on those days?
GREG: Are there days… I’ve been writing say magazine articles and books every since college many years ago. Ben, I don’t think there’s been one day that I sat down at my keyboard wanting to write. And maybe that I shouldn’t admit that. But it’s strange that I have to go to the keyboard and just pound away at that first sentence to get to it. And even there there’s a struggle. But the thing is—I think this is what really drives me—when I’m not at the keyboard I have all these great ideas that I want to put down. I’ve got books I want to write, I think of article ideas—almost always when I’m driving down the road I think if I can pull off at that instance and turn on the laptop I think I can write a chapter, because the ideas are flowing. But when I finally get back to my computer, email is always on—oh I better check my email—there are always a million things I want to do first.
And how I handle it is just—first of all deadlines help. And if you’re not going the traditional publishing route which is okay to do, and I hope we can get into to that—but I prefer self publishing right now. And probably most of your listeners will want to do that for a number of reasons. You will still have to have deadlines that you create for yourself. I’ll say by Friday I’ve got to get this article sent to this website. Or I’ve got to have this chapter in this book and have it formatted. And if I don’t have my own deadlines I just put it off. And something inside clicks though when I just sit down at the keyboard and I open up a blank document and I just start typing that first word. then I have to type the second word. Then I type the first sentence. And it’s not really work drudgery, it’s just I’d rather be doing something else. But something happens once you start doing that and you finish a sentence or two. Something inside will just start clicking and you’ll keep writing and you won’t think about all the other things you could be doing.
And the way it works for me—and I’ve heard works for many other writers—you’ll look up and you’ll have finished a chapter, and this sounds kind of new agey, and if you knew me you would know the term new age does not describe me at all, but once I’ve finished, I often don’t even remember writing a lot of what I wrote. And when I finish a book I can re-read large sections of it and not even recall writing it. And for those who simply don’t have what it takes to be an author but they’ve got the knowledge, that might sound discouraging to them. That it’s so hard for me to get to the keyboard. But all I can say is yeah, it is tough for many. It may not be for everyone listening. But I’m the one—again not to brag—but I’m the one with 80 something book—at 75 I quite counting. But proof is in the pudding. Look what has been accomplished even though it sounds like I think it’s drudgery work and I really don’t think that—it’s just hard to get those first two sentences down. And once you do that it really—if you have that same problem I have—it really will start flying.
And actually now that I self publish so much, I find it a lot easier to produce because in the traditional publishing world what you write may not see a bookstore until a year or after you write it. And with self publishing the selling of my writing is so close to the actual time I write it that there’s hardly any lead time. If it’s an article for some website like lewrockwell.com or something I know that what I write today is going to have an audience in about two days from now. And I know at the bottom of that my by-line—my biography at the bottom—will link to my latest eBook that I’m selling, and it’ll be producing sales in a couple of day and so that’s far more encouraging to get me to that keyboard than it used to be when it might be a year before I would see any results from my writing.
BEN: You were talking about how when you are driving you’d like to pull off to the side… I mean I can relate to that. There’s this one guy—I don’t him personally, he was writing about this somewhere—what he does is he writes all of his books while driving and he has a recorder with him and he just starts talking into it when he’s driving and then he has it transcribed, then he just smoothes everything out and then turns it into a book.
GREG: That’s brilliant. And I started doing that—I actually found a cell phone that has a large memory call so that I can transcribe into my cell phone. I used to have a little recorder but I would always to take it with me, but you’ve always got your cell phone. And so if you can get—and most cell phones have little note taking services now that most cell phones that are just even mediocre-advanced, not just the high priced ones—have that capability. I think that’s brilliant. Never considered writing the whole book. I just think of new ideas. That’s when I really shine in the car. But yeah, I write best when I see the words appear on the paper in front of me. Or on the screen. And so I would find it hard to actually write content that way. But I find it easy to get ideas that way. Other people are going to be different. I think that’s great.
BEN: Now all this writing that you’ve been doing… has it gotten you other kinds of work?
GREG: Oh a bunch of other kinds of work. When people learn that you’ve written a book, they view you as an expert. And you yourself might think, “Well, I know a lot about it, but I’m not really an expert.” And the thing is yes you really are. I mean if you have enough knowledge in your head to write about something—say archery, bow and arrow shooting—if you have enough to fill a 75 to 300 page book, even a 75 page eBook or something—you probably know more about that subject than at least 90% of all people on earth and probably more than that. And if you really think about it, what you know enough to write about you are an expert in that subject. And you get something called a halo effect and they start viewing you as an expert and you get through barriers that otherwise wouldn’t be there.
I get lots of requests for consulting and teaching local colleges and seminars and all that. But I’ve also written several eBooks with some really advanced eBay ideas—we’re really into eBay here at our house with a consignment business and a consulting business—and just from my eBay eBooks, I now write a syndicated newspaper column about eBay and that has grown our consignment business and that encourages me to write more because through eBay I sell a lot of my own material as well. And it all kind of snowballs and things happen since I’m a writer that wouldn’t otherwise happen—I speak at national conferences. This was kind of funny—a few years ago at least one of my books has now appeared in a big budget motion picture.
BEN: Which one was that?
GREG: Sandra Bullock starred in a move called, “The Net.” They panned onto my book up in one of her book cases up there. Yeah, we were just sitting there in the theater and they panned to my book and I yelled at—I wouldn’t do this normally—”That’s my book!” And then I was real embarrassed. But both my wife and I were pretty excited about that. In the scheme of things that’s a pretty minor thing. It’s certainly wouldn’t have generated sales or anything probably. But that was pretty exciting. And I was recently featured on Pen And Teller—I don’t know if you know about them. They’re kind of magicians and comedians and they have a Showtime special series that they featured me due to a book I wrote called, “Disabling America.” Pretty much I was the whole show as far as their viewpoint of the subject.
BEN: You know what it reminds me of, I was talking to my friend Michael Senoff yesterday—he does hardtofindseminars.com
GREG: He’s great.
BEN: And he does all these interviews and I was talking to him about it and he goes, “Look, the more of these interviews you do, you’re going to find people just want to consult with you out of the blue.”
GREG: Isn’t that something.
BEN: It’s that halo effect. Like you were just saying.
GREG: It is the halo effect. You are an expert. Again, you really are. I mean, you do know more than the person who wants to hire you. They want your knowledge. And are you the #1 person on earth in that subject? Maybe, maybe not. But that really doesn’t matter, you don’t have to be. I’m really big on giving people value for their time and money. And so I won’t take on a job if I cannot do a good job at it. I won’t write a book if I can’t do a good job at it. Because I don’t want to cheat them and it wastes my time. But I will be glad to consult for someone if they want to hire me to do something in a subject I know something about. Even if I myself think there’s so much I don’t know about this, I obviously know enough to help this person. And if I do I’ll help them out.
BEN: You’re just opening so many possibilities here that I know I never thought about. I can’t imagine anyone who even has written an eBook who can’t just take that and start running with some of these ideas—they’re great.
GREG: Well the possibilities are great and it’s all because of technology today. As long as you got something to say and as long as you somehow have the ability to get it down and get your words down so they’re readable.
BEN: I just think of everyone who’s got a blog right now—they’ve probably got half a book written right now and don’t even realize it.
GREG: Sure. Exactly.
BEN: And then plus the comments from that blog help them come up with more ideas and come up with more answers to objections that maybe they’ve been getting and so on. And it’s all done for you almost if you’ve been doing this sort of thing.
GREG: It is. My biggest problem is I’ve got too much to write. It’s not, “Oh what am I going to write?” I’ve never gone through that in my life.
BEN: You were talking about how for you writing is strictly a business and I want to kind of segue into the business side of this. For someone who wants to succeed at what you would call the writing business, what would you suggest?
GREG: Well, first of all, you need to improve upon your writing first of all. As you said you have to be a prolific reader and you must write a lot. But in order to really make this work, I really want to re-stress that writing is a business. And if you want to write poetry and just express your emotions or whatever that’s fine, and there might be a market for it. And every once in a while there’s a huge market for it, but usually there’s not a huge market for it.
If you want to sell your writing it’s time to get serious about it and understand it’s just a business. And your boss is the reading public and it used to be your boss in writing were the major book publishers. But technology has really turned that on its head as we’ll talk about I hope in this interview. And there are ways to hone your craft. I’d get autobiographies written by famous authors and writers and read those. You’ll learn a whole lot about the process of writing doing that. Stephen King has written two such books about writing—one called Danse Macabre was not all about writing, but he wrote another one about how he writes. And I would go to Barnes And Noble and look at writing magazines and pretty much ignore everything in them unless they have an article by a top named author. And you’ll find those occasionally by someone who’s a wild success. And you need to soak up whatever that person says. They’ll give you hints and tips and again I think it’s critical you use your educational and teaching sources only from those who have approved themselves—not just the local community college. Only those who have proved themselves. That’s how you will become better at this business.
BEN: And I would imagine that since a lot of the people listening to this call especially are well versed in direct marketing—they can take an idea that one of those authors says and probably enhance it.
GREG: Oh sure. Yeah, because those authors are not used to doing any marketing. Tom Clancy doesn’t market his own books. He does not do it. And he doesn’t have to. And that’s the really advantage that your listeners are going to have is that they will understand the importance of direct marketing. I understand the importance of direct marketing, I’m just not good at it. And I know to hire someone like you whenever I need an ad written or something like that. And as long as you understand why that’s so important you can sell a book easily in today’s world.
BEN: You were talking about self publishing before and you and I have exchanged many emails on this subject. You’ve come to the conclusion that that’s the way to go now. What are some things people need to know about self publishing before even starting to write their book?
GREG: Well, the transition is as a writer you’ve got two options: you can go major publisher or self publishing. A few years ago—and I think it’s important to go back about ten years and see where we were, and that’s not that long ago—if you wanted to get something published, you would try to go through a major publisher’s gate keeper and get a manuscript read and accepted and all that. Or you could publish yourself—do self publishing, paying to get your own book published in what they call the vanity press market. And I think that term is a deriding term, it’s really vanity press was usually said with a sneer. Generally people who self published before about 2001 or 2002 generally did very badly, or had very bad success, or very poor success. And they had no audience because book stores are tied to major publishers and you couldn’t get your book in a book store.
And until about six years ago my advice was to write magazine articles and keep pounding the doors of major publishers. And my advice today is 180 degrees the opposite. Self publishing is the way to go in almost every case. And here’s what you lose by doing self publishing—and this is what everyone thinks about I think—when you don’t get published by a major publisher you lose an entire marketing division of a multi-million dollar company. That’s big, if you don’t have that advertising machine behind you, and you virtually never see your book in a book store because they all contract to stock books distributed by major book distributors—especially like Ingram which is the largest book distributor in the world I believe—and distributors are tied to book publishers and they don’t want to carry any book except the major presses. So you’ll probably never walk into a Borders book store and see your own book even today. Now there are rare exceptions to this. The first “Chicken Soup For The Soul” book—that’s a huge series—that was a vanity press book. Ten of 15 years ago the authors went from book store to book store. They did know direct marketing and they knew what to do to promote their own book. And they kept pushing and pushing trying to get shelf space. And they would start off in little mom and pop book stores—of which there are very few left these days because of the major chains. And they did somehow crack the mammoth traditional publishing route through the back door but the odds are tremendously against you to do that.
And so with all this said, why would you ever want to publish your own book? Especially what I said was you probably will never see your book in a traditional book store. You probably never will even if you self publish it even today. Well first of all, you’ll make more per book if you self publish. And that’s pretty big. If this is a business, I want to make the most profit I can per book that I sell. And you keep all but your costs. And you get a very small piece of the pie when a major publisher publishers it. So you get rewarded for that extra risk. Instead of a dollar or a dollar twenty per book you sell, you might keep $14 or more. And if all that sounds like peanuts still, you’ve got consider the number of book stores in the country. I’m going to talk about a very dark secret in the publishing business. As crazy as it sounds, major publishers don’t want their multi-million dollar advertising department promoting first time authors. Even if you’ve got a book published, they just drop your book in a catalog and put a few of your books in the distributor’s shipments and hope for the best. Publishers spend all their money on John Grisham and Tom Clancy—not on Sally Jarvis who just wrote her first book on knitting. they don’t give any attention to new books. And all they do is play the numbers games.
So I want to convince you—your audience—that self publishing is not the risk that at first it sounds like. The big publishers plan that the majority of their titles—especially their new titles—will be flops. They won’t spend any money on them. They’ll just play that numbers game for that one that might skyrocket out and then we have the next Tom Clancy. So the promotion will always come from authors. If you get a book published by a major press your book will sell if you promote it. Your book if you write articles about it, if you hit the book stores and you set up signings and you travel across the country on your dime because the publishers will laugh at you if you ask them for the money. And your book will die a quick death if you don’t do all that you can to promote your own book.
And if you’re going to do that why do you want just a small portion of that book, why not self publish and put all that resource into a higher profit margin book that probably more people will see? If you think about it, in America alone, how many major book stores are there? I don’t know, probably five or six thousand of any decent size. And so how many books of a first time author would each store carry? Most stores won’t even carry one. Or a lot of them won’t. Some might carry one or two. You might have 8,000 to 12,000 in the stores when your book first is published. And how many of those will sell? Certainly not all of them. Actually very few. And because you’re competing in a store, each store carries 45 to 70 thousands competing against you in that one store; and the odds are you won’t sell very many. Traditional publishing is not the answer. And it always was before because we didn’t have technology to make self publishing a better answer. But now we have that. It’s true, you must sell almost twelve times more books using a traditional publisher than you need to sell if you self publish to make the same amount of money.
BEN: Another thing that I think what you’re right about here is you spend a lot of time writing a book usually. You can easily pre-test your idea if your self publishing you can just do a little recording and see if it sells on eBay. And if it has legs maybe write it. But I guess if you’re going to a regular traditional publisher, don’t you have to send them the whole book?
GREG: Well actually, for nonfiction you don’t, you generally send a chapter and then a detailed outline. For fiction you almost always have to send the whole book. And so that’s fine—you have the one chapter but if they want your book you have to write the entire book and then wait a year or more in many many cases—I’ve been fortunate to write for the computer market a lot, most of my books over the years in traditional publishing has been on computers topics—Windows Vista, things like that. And because of how fast the computer market moves and changes, they get my books in the stores in about two months after I finish the last edit. And that’s amazingly fast in this business. Just amazing. But they have to because of the nature of computers. Which is one reason computer books are like $30 and $40—they do have a lot more risk to the publishers because of how fast they have to print them. But you still have to write your entire book if it’s going the traditional route before you ever see if it’s going to sell. Because just because an editor accepts it doesn’t mean it’s going to sell. I just went through all of that about showing you the odds are tremendously against you selling very many books if you go the traditional route unless you promote yourself. And even then you’re still fighting the odds of a book store wanting to order more than one copy of your book ini a town. And it’s hard to fight that.
It used to be the New York Times Best-Seller list was so important. And now it’s really a joke. So less important today than it ever was in the history of publishing. It’s a dinosaur. It’s far more important to sell your books via the Internet and far more lucrative to sell it as you said—audio form, eBook form—eBook especially is just a great way to sell books at a high profit margins. And that’s so much more important to have your book in all those format electronically, than selling it in the major chains and getting on the New York Times Best-Seller list, which you probably never get on. I mean, I’m speaking to everyone in your audience, probably none of us will ever be on the New York Times Best-Seller list.
But in today’s world with technology you don’t care as long as you don’t make a lot of mistakes when self publishing your books. And it’s not that hard to correct the mistakes you make when you self publish. So you will be far more successful self publishing in today’s world, the way it is now.
BEN: I think of Paul Hartunian with his How To Love Of Your Life book—I know that’s never been on the New York Time Best-Seller list. But yet it’s outsold almost every book ever published.
GREG: Certainly, yeah, it’s done very, very well.
BEN: So it’s really just getting out of this mindset that you have to be in the mainstream and play that game.
GREG: It really is. And I won’t keep pounding that, but I just want your listeners to know that the alternative of self publishing is a dramatically better answer today than it ever was before. Just tremendously better.
BEN: Now, when people self publish, they obviously—even if they were doing the regular, way, but especially when self publishing—they have to market their own books. What’s the biggest mistake that you see people making when they’re marketing their self published books?
GREG: Well, I’ve seen several. I would say probably one of the biggest mistakes is I see a lot of people going to buy google AdWords to sell their books. Whenever you go to google.com you’ll see on the right hand side—and many of your listeners know what this is—a bunch of little ads that you can click. If you enter a topic on archery, then on the right hand side a bunch of links will appear and those are paid advertisements that you can click to learn more about archery. And I see a lot of first time authors buy up a bunch of google AdWords and try to sell their books that way, and they really spend a lot of time and get very little return in almost every case. And so I wouldn’t go that route.
And self publishers don’t understand the importance of freshness I sense. As I’ve told you I’m always trying to get my next work done—my next product created, my next book written. You need to keep working at your promotion. You don’t have the multi-milion dollar advertising budget—which wouldn’t be used anyway. You need to get your book you’re writing in front of people. And I have quick tips that I jotted down that I think your listeners will really benefit from. Little tiny short tips that you as a self published do you won’t make the mistakes that so many of them make, and you’re going to feel a lot more successful.
First of all, don’t just sell a book. Sell a book, and sell an eBook. Put it into electronic form. Sell an audio book. Break all your chapters out and sell special reports. You may have to do minor editing, but not much. Sell interviews of people about your subject—and that’s a huge advantage self publishers have now over the traditional route. You own your book. You can distribute it in any form you want. I can’t take one of my computer books—or “Disabling America” published by a big press—and just sell an audio book of it. I’m not allowed to do that, I don’t own the copyright to that book right now, they do. And so the most cost efficient format you can sell your book in I have found is an eBook format—like a pdf format. So when someone buys it you just email it to them. But there are even far better ways to distribute eBooks than that which are automated. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit.
But speaking of email, tips number 2: think about how many emails you routinely send every day—ten or fifteen—I usually send 50 or 100 on some days when I’m really working hard. And every email system that I know of has the ability to create an email signature at the bottom of your emails. It’s a little message that appears at the bottom of every email you send. And you can just control it and change it and say from this email account I want this email signature to automatically appear. And in that email signature it’s not just your name—it can be a message, a marketing message, a headline to sell your book with a link that they can click to buy your book. Or to learn more about your book. You wouldn’t just say “click to buy.” You would say “if you want more information about hitting your target every time you shoot your bow and arrow then click here and read this free report.” And so you should create an email signature that promotes your products.
Also put your book on eBay immediately. That is the easiest way to create a low test market. If it doesn’t sell, change the title, add some new key words, change the subject until it begins selling. Change the price. If you need to drop it, change it some until you start seeing the sale improve a little bit. And you’ll start getting some feedback from that information. Again eBay is a very inexpensive way to sell your material. And to see if there’s any market at all for your book. And once you make a sale, you will begin growing a mailing list of your readers and customers. That if they liked your first book, they’re going to like your next one probably. And you and all of your listeners know that your list is gold. That’s the gold. I won’t go into the importance of a marketing list here of current customers. But Ben, you’ve got ton of resources on things like that. And eBay’s automated the process now of distributing eBooks, so you don’t even have to send you book now when it’s over. eBay just sends out a link where they can download your book. You’ll learn a lot by messing around with eBay and your eBook. You will also find a phenomenon that occurs—if you raise your price on eBay sometimes you’ll get more sales than if you lower it. And eBook has a perceived value that is very low on eBay, unless the price is $29.95 and then the perceived value goes up dramatically. So play around with price, it’s a great test market.
In addition to eBay, every self publisher needs to know about Clickbank.com. And there are lots of others—I’m just telling you about the ones I use. Clickbank.com put all your eBooks there. The great thing about Clickbank and eBay is they handle your payments, they handle your downloads—all that stuff. And really a self publisher can make a decent living just working their own list, working eBay and working Clickbank. And once you have all those routes you automatically free up some of your time and you can start promoting your books elsewhere. You can locate websites that talk about your subject and offer to write articles free of charge for them. Again, you get that feedback and at the end of each article they give you a by-line and they let you put a link to one of your book promotion sites. Say, “Click here if you want to learn more about this subject…” and it’ll be next to your name and you’ll be a perceived expert because you just wrote an article for this person that they go to that they read regularly. You’re perceived as an expert. And that really helps your sales.
I’ve heard a lot about ezines and online newsletters and things. I see far more success personally writing complete articles for sites than going the e-newsletter route. Website pages stay active a lot longer. I get sales from years ago from a link that I thought was even dead. because the article is still up there on that person’s site. And the reason self publishing didn’t work before this decade is that you didn’t have all this technology available to you and now you do. And so the vanity press market rules don’t apply anymore. You can be your own advertising powerhouse, you can distribute your books much more effectively than major publishers can.
BEN: One of the questions I remember when I was—last year I guess—I was telling you about my dog book and everything and I’m like, “Greg, do I really need to mess around getting an ISBN number and all that.” And you said absolutely yes, you have to do that. Can you show people how they get around some of the red tape to getting one of those? Because I found it to be kind of a pain the first time.
GREG: Yeah. Actually, it is a pain the first time. And I don’t think there’s any way to avoid all the pain. I want to tell you I strongly encouraged you to get an ISBN because your book was so good. You sent me a sample copy because you learned—right before that we had dog and loved them and do all this stuff for them—your book was so good that it had to have an ISBN number. And the reason that is true, is because amazon and all of the online book sellers—whether it be eBook sellers or any other—will not look at you unless your product has an ISBN. Now if it’s a product like a suit —some actual physical product that’s not an information product—you’ll need a UPC code or all that stuff. But for an information product like a book, you must have an ISBN number or they won’t talk to you.
Now, this is another dark dirty secret about the publishing business. An ISBN is a bureaucratic mess. Our government has allowed one company to control all ISBN numbers and to sell them and they have the right to distribute ISBN numbers and no other place can sell them. And so they’re very high priced. And they can get expensive and the other drawback to an ISBN—even though you have to have it—if you have a book that you paid a publisher to print and then they mail your 500 copies or whatever you order—that book has an ISBN number. If you then convert that book to audio, your audio book has to have a different ISBN number. Then if you convert it to an eBook in pdf format that has to have a different ISBN number. And if you rewrite your book and update it because new material came in and you changed one chapter and it goes into a second edition—that has to have a different ISBN number and they all have to be different.
So you can’t get away from it. If you want to be taken seriously and really have the major online sellers sell your book you have to do it. And ISBN numbers are expensive. There’s only one company in our country and that’s called Bowker. And if you go to bowker.com you can learn all about the ISBN process. You can go more quickly to at isbn.org. And if you go to isbn.org, you’ll see that you have three options. You can order ten ISBN numbers, you can order 100 ISBN numbers, or you can order 1,000 ISBN numbers. And if you only want one, too bad. You need ten or 100 or 1000. But if you write only one book you’re going to be distributing it in other formats. So you will need to order ten. That’s okay. That’s not that bad until you hear the price And the price is always rising and as we speak the price is almost $30 a piece. The ISBN now costs about $27.50 something about in that range. And they’ll make you buy ten of them so the first time you have an ISBN number all your own—that you can apply to your title—it’ll cost you $275.
BEN: Plus there’s a processing fee I think of like $19.
GREG: They add a fee and there’s something they did to me recently that I went to them to assign of my unused ISBN numbers and they wouldn’t talk to me if I didn’t pay another fee. It was like you haven’t been here in a while and you gotta pay another $20 to reactive your account or something—I never could figure that out. I don’t think that was right, I think it was just screwed up. But that’s what they did. It’s a racket. But the more you order at one time, the less per ISBN number. If you order 100 of them, instead of $27 per ISBN you only pay $9.95 per ISBN. And if you want 1,000 you pay only $1.75 per ISBN. I wouldn’t recommend you order 1,000 of them. If you’re extremely excited about self publishing and you can afford it, you will save a ton of money buying your first ISBN’s in a lot of 100. But it sure is hard to justify that. And I think you should just buy 10 and then when your book starts selling and you start to run out of ISBN’s you can buy another batch. The way the process works is once you buy your 10 ISBN’s you then have to assign an ISBN to a product—to a book or an eBook. And you have to go online to bowker.com, their sister site isbn.org, you have to describe your book and tell the price and tell what format and tell the audience… and the whole way they’re trying to bombard you with ads of other things that they will do to help promote your book and you need to ignore all of that. Whatever they do, you can do better on your own. All you want out of them—in my opinion—are their ISBN numbers.
BEN: You mentioned amazon.com. And I love amazon I do nothing to promote my book on amazon and I’ll get a handful of sales every month. I can see the power of that if someone really knew how to tap into it. How can someone get their self published book on amazon?
GREG: I tell you, it used to be really easy. Now it’s a little bit harder but not impossible. You have to jump through a few more hoops. First you have to have an agreement with the distributor. Amazon used to allow anybody who published a book to sell their book. And now that actually still is possible if you become an amazon associate. You can create a little amazon store and sell basically anything you want including your own book. But it doesn’t really result in the book sales that selling a true book on amazon the traditional route through amazon’s traditional online sources will produce. So what you really need to do that sells to amazon their catalog of books. The one that I found is best and easiest—and I’m sure others will disagree with me—is lightningsource.com. And if I recall I think you use them.
BEN: Yes, they do all that for you, you don’t have to do anything.
GREG: You don’t have to do anything. And they take a cut—some fee—but hey, it’s worth it. Let them handle everything. Now, my question to you, will they even get an ISBN number if you want them to?
BEN: No, you have to do that. There are companies that do that but you won’t get as much per sale.
GREG: So anyway, lightningsource.com will even publish your physical book. They’ll distribute it in eBook format to as many online sellers as possible. The big problem with amazon is lightingsource and no one else can sell eBooks from amazon anymore.
BEN: I didn’t realize that.
GREG: There’s only one company that can do that and it’s owned by amazon. And I’ll talk about that in a second, let me finish with lightningsource.com. They can do everything else and they’ll get your book on amazon as soon as physically possible and I highly recommend lightningsource.com
BEN: Within just a few weeks actually.
GREG: Just really fast. Unbelievably fast. Think about how it used to be and the neatest thing to sell on amazon though are eBooks and this is where you make the most money per item because there’s no publishing cost of the physical book. But amazon last year stopped selling eBooks in pdf format. Which is just astounding because pdf is the most universal eBook format on earth. Now, somehow they’re still selling some of them. No one has made that clear to all of us self publishers on how that’d done, but in general, amazon purchased a company called Mobipocket.com. And now if you want to sell your book in eBook format on amazon you must create an account with mobipocket, you must convert your eBook into mobipocket format which is not a straight forward thing to do—especially if your eBook is nicely formatted and you spent a bunch of time and effort and hired someone to do graphic design and all that. All of that goes away. Only then will amazon consider selling your eBook in most instances and that’s only after you do all that.
But remember, I said the New York Best-Seller list is important. But was is important is get your books selling on amazon. That’s where the key is these days. And getting on amazon is so important it’s worth jumping through a few hoops. And if you have a physical book it is worth converting that into an eBook also and getting it sold on amazon, too. So amazon has lots of best-seller lists. New York times has one or two, amazon has lots. They’ve got best-selling crocheting categories and rock cd categories and so it’s actually very easy without too many sales to get a book on some amazon’s best selling categories in certain niche subjects that you’d probably be writing about. And so you can get success on amazon relatively easy And it is worth the effort. But it is a small effort to do that to get an eBook on amazon. Lightningsource.com the way you get just a regular book on amazon that’s the easy way.
BEN: One of the things that you told me a few months ago that really kind of motivated me to get things going is you started telling me about how you used publicity to promote your books. And I have to agree with wholeheartedly now that I’ve gone through all that. What are some tips on using publicity for promoting self-published books?
One way to do that is simple, just contact your local newspaper. And I think you should drop by if it’s a local paper—even if it’s in a big city. Give them your book and tell them exactly how a newspaper on that topic where they quote you would interest their readers. And they want to interest readers. They don’t want to sell your book. But they understand that’s part of the process. Part of the process is if they interview you about a topic that’s in the news that relates to your book—you’re the exper—but part of the tradeoff is they also mention the name of your book. That’s just what they do. And that gets your feet wet and it’s kind of small change—the local newspaper.
Then you should begin a major publicity campaign once you kind of get your feet wet trying to get interviewed on the number radio format in the country which is talk radio. And it’s not as difficult as you think. And I can talk a little bit about it. Not much—the better place to learn how to do that with the least expert is a man who you spoke of early named Paul Hartunian. He has this stuff down to a science. He will tell you do step one, do step two, do step three, send it out and you will—and I speak from experience—as soon as you follow his process, the phone starts ringing from radio shows that want to interview me. All you do is you go to paulhartunian.com—it’s spelled just like it sounds—paulhartunian.com. I don’t get anything for recommending his product. I actually I do—I get the satisfaction that, Ben, I just told your listeners the number one place to go to.
BEN: Oh, I whole-heartedly agree a thousand percent. I don’t even see why anyone would listen to these other publicity people. But I may be just saying that from a biased point of view.
GREG: Maybe, but I don’t know—he’s the number one guy.
BEN: Yeah, he’s incredible.
GREG: Order his publicity kit immediately. Just one or two radio interviews in a large market can be worth thousands to you. I mean, it could be.
BEN: And it’s so easy. My wife is like, “Wow Ben, you’re on the radio!” And you’re thinking, “Yeah!” And your family is all proud of you and stuff.
GREG: And you know to record everyone one of those interviews for content later.
BEN: Oh yeah, it’s so easy. It really is. And plus he—just buying his product you get his newsletter and there’s so many other ideas for business besides publicity in there.
GREG: That an audience such as yours would grow tremendously by reading this newsletter.
BEN: Oh yeah, I think I’ve read his newsletters three or four times and I just go through them all regularly now. And there’s always something new. And like you were telling me before, okay a lot of it’s repetition and that’s good but, once in a while—like every couple issues… BAM! he just throws something at you and you’re like, “Holy cow! I never thought of doing that.”
GREG: And he’ll tell it the way it is. He’ll offend some people because he’ll say don’t be stupid, don’t do this, do something else. Or don’t even mess with it if you’re just not going to take this seriously on this one idea. He’s very black and white, cut and dry. Because he knows what works.
BEN: And some people might interpret that as being kind of grumpy, but I understand why he’s like that.
GREG: I like grumpy.
BEN: And just so everyone knows that you’re not just making this up, he actually mentioned you in one of the newsletters and said you had done a really good job with something. So this is all very real. We’re not just making things up out of thin air here.
GREG: Oh sure. If there was someone better, I wouldn’t have mentioned Paul Hartunian. In my opinion, he is the best. So why mess with anyone else?
BEN: Well yeah, and just as a little acid test, he says something that’s very interesting. Everyone else is telling you after you send out a press release about your book or whatever to go and follow up call with these people. And he’s like, “Well if you’re sending out 400 press releases, you’re going to make 400 phone calls?” Now that’s how I know someone knows what they’re talking about. And I have to say I called Bacon’s up—because I wanted to get a subscription to their service—even they were telling me the same thing, “Yeah, you gotta just keep calling these people up and stuff…” And I’m thinking, “Oh boy…”
GREG: That’s exactly right. So just go to the best source—that’s Paul—buy his publicity kit and just start doing it.
BEN: You said the publicity and articles and that sort of thing—what are some other good ways to promote a self published book?
GREG: Well, one thing you can do is create your own affiliate program and offer other people a large percentage of your income to sell your book for you. They can add your book to their own packages for an added bonus, they can pay you a fixed or percentage fee, or you can just use one of the affiliate programs—there are several of them around like Clickbank. And commissionjunction—you can sign up and add your eBook into the channels of the affiliate programs out there and offer someone 75% of the income to sell it for you because that’s a sale you wouldn’t have made anyway. And so it’s good to get your book on it. Now everyone is trying to get other affiliates to sell their products and there’s actually a lot of competition. A lot of affiliate marketers make that sound a whole lot successful than it is. But it’s just another avenue, another pillar that you use to publicize your book, to let someone else do it.
And when you advertise your book anywhere—whenever you make a sale always collect testimonials, always listen to what people say about your book. Or if you write an article. We talked about not only will you be able to hone your article and your writing but, if it’s a good testimonial, write that person and ask if they’ll send you a sentence or two that you can use elsewhere. Because whenever you then promote the book with more and more testimonials, it’s not you selling the book. It’s not perceived as pushy self promotion—which actually you should never feel that way anyway—it could never feel like pushy self promotion if all these other people are praising your book. So always collect testimonials even for something like an eBook.
And keep your list up to date, send to your own list often. This is a direct marketing skill that I’m sure many of your audience members understand. But, people bought your book on a certain subject—even a one page email with just information about a new tip that you learned that you want to share with them. Make it advice heavy and ad light. Extremely ad light. Just a link or two or maybe even send out one or two newsletters and not have any promotion whatsoever in it. It will just add to your perception to being an expert. And every time you write one of those little one page emails you got more material to use in your next book that you will sell to that list.
And I talked a lot about eBooks because I’m real high on them. But an eBook is just leverage to create more products. Once you write your first book you have your eBook and audio book as we said earlier. But each chapter become its own book. Not its own article—each chapter becomes its own book. I wrote a book on rental property and every one of those chapters could be expanded into its own book. The best way to get rid of tenants that tear up your house or something like that—I have enough material to turn that into a book if I wanted to.
BEN: That is a great book, by the way. I remember when you sent me a copy of that.
GREG: Well I appreciate it. It’s one I need to do more with but I’m so busy creating new products that I never promote my existing ones.
BEN: How do you sell your physical books through affiliates, or do you just do eBooks that way?
GREG: I have only sold eBooks that way. I’ve never had a book self published that I actually had printed. I guess because I have so many printed books by major publishers that I guess it’s hard for me to pay for a book to be published because I have some publishers that will publish just about anything—I mean, I’ve had so much success ini the major publishing route they’ll publish just about anything I want to write. I can usually talk them into it. And so I just let them do all that work once in a while. And the other thing is I’m kind of a proved success in some of my publishers’ eyes because my books have done fairly well at times. And so they promote my books more than other authors and so I’m actually really fortunate in the traditional route that I’ve put them down in this call, and yet, it’s been good to me and I have to admit. But right now really all I want to promote is my eBooks because I think that’s where the highest profit margin is and that’s where I think I can make the most per item. And I have several—probably about 25—in process right now that I’m working on. And so that’s really where I’m focusing on.
But I really have a problem that I really have to overcome that I think your audience can learn from this. But I’m so busy creating my next products that I don’t devote nearly enough time for promotion and it’s certainly hurt my wallet over the years.
BEN: A lot of people who are listening to this are probably in that transition where they maybe are still working at a job, and they want to get over that hurdle so they can do this stuff full time. What’s it like being a full time author and what can people expect when they reach that level?
GREG: Well, I’ve been a full time author now since about 1994, so about 13 years. And before that I wrote almost full time—I taught at a college for five years and teaching full time is like a part time job. So my writing was our primary source of income back then, too. Being a full time author is not as glamorous as almost everyone thinks it is. The movies look really grand but when my first book appeared in the book stores I think that was about 1985. It was an amazing experience. Walking up and seeing my book on the shelf. And after seeing it one time—and I was already working on my next title—it was never a big deal again. It was just a business. And I guess I sound kind of like a mercenary. I think that just comes naturally. I think a lot of authors would feel that way—maybe most. I’m not knocking it, I’m just saying it is a business and I do write to support my family.
The huge advantage of being a writer is that you can work from anywhere you are. We used to travel a lot—really the whole world—really cheaply. We follow this guy named Rick Steves and he wrote a series of books called “Europe Through The Back Door” and he tells how you can travel all over the world very, very inexpensively. And so even though it sounds glamorous to travel the world—which we really did—it wasn’t like we spent a bunch of money doing it. I mean we would backpack and stay at the one start places and all that. But I had my laptop with me and I remember being in Egypt and we had a cruise we were on a boat cruising down the Nile River and on that boat is where I wrote my entire book on managing rental properties. Sitting out there in the sun with an iced tea watching the pyramids on the left fly by…
BEN: Wow man…
GREG: Now that’s pretty glamorous I’ll admit. That’s pretty neat. But anybody could do that it just takes a laptop. That’s not that big of a deal. Now if we drive to Dallas for a weekend, we’ll take 9 suitcases, but if we got to Italy for two months we take like two changes of clothing. We take hardly anything. And we really know how to do it really cheaply thanks to this “Europe Through The Back Door” guide. And so, anybody can do that if they have a laptop. It’s technology in action. And if you like the freedom of being able to do that, then it’s a great life.
The other disadvantage though is if you stop writing your income will dry up. There is a time lag, but eventually your books do stop selling. And so just like any business you’re self employed in, you’ve got to work at it. But writing gives you the ability to try things with very little risk. You don’t have to build a building and see if it’ll rent. You don’t have to build a business and see if you can sell something. I even tried fiction once. I’ve only written one piece of fiction in my entire life. And it’s one of those little story things. I just woke up and I got out of bed and immediately typed it into my laptop and I sent it in to some local book contest and it ended up winning its category—which shocked me more than anybody. And I don’t think it’s sellable. But that didn’t take any risk to write that little thing. It didn’t take a lot of time really, it was a short story. And even with anything—non-fiction, an article—there’s not much risk there. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to create a product. And so I think that’s a huge advantage to being a writer. But don’t write to express most of the time. I write to eat. I never write something that I’m no excited about but I would actually talking about that just quickly. I would say that you can lot larger success at writing non fiction than fiction. I think the risk is much lower. And so I think that’s why I write non fiction almost exclusively. I think it’s far easier to break into it successful non fiction market than fiction. And it pays you a lot more to do that.
BEN: And just to reiterate what you just said, it’s a business. And use your marketing skills and have back end offers in your book and just keep sending people to you and your products and you can only multiply your sales from there.
GREG: That’s exactly right. And if you self publish a book that you’re selling on amazon and eBay and everywhere else—at the bottom of each page put your website address if you’ve got one. Put a link to join your email list. And all throughout your list you have these little link—in a real physical boo—that they can go to and learn more about your other products.
BEN: Yeah, I know Matt Furey does that with all his books and I just mimicked what he was doing and I get people coming to me. And people who bought it on amazon—I don’t know who they are. And they’ll end up buying things throughout the years.
GREG: Exactly.
BEN: Now anyone who is listening to this and is interested in this—I know I am—do you have any products, services… is there any way they can find you for more information?
GREG: Well, there are several ways to find me. The easiest is I have a very large presence on eBay. And at the present I don’t know that we’ve got a lot of auctions on, but we run from 25 to 400 auctions at one time. And I have a lot of articles up on eBay and I actually just recently added a link to my very first eBook which was about eBay—a very advanced selling technique. And if any of your audience members are interested they can just have that book free. Just right click and download. And really the best way to get to that point is to go my eBay “about me” page and the way you do that is go to our auctions. I’m not trying to promote our auctions it’s just the easiest way to get to my information. If you go to a website address called bidmentor.com. And I teach seminars on eBay and I write newspaper articles and so one of my eBay id’s is bidmentor—I’m mentoring people in eBay. So bidmentor.com. If you go there, what you’ll see is just a list of our current auctions. And if you click on one of those or at the top of the page you’ll see a “me” about me icon next to my ID. Click on that and it’ll take you to my and my wife’s about me page on eBay where we have all of our resources. At the very top in large letters I have that eBook that your audience can download. And again, it’s the very first eBook that I published…
BEN: What’s the title of that one?
GREG: It’s called “eBay Ecstasy”.
BEN: That’s a very good book. I remember you sent it to me.
GREG: Oh okay, well good. I appreciate knowing that. I think it’s got a little tip in there on how to increase the profit on each sale you make on eBay dramatically. And it’s so underutilized why people don’t use it more is just beyond me. But anyway, that’s good for the people who do use it. I do want to say my eBay Ecstasy eBook has a subtitle that has been fairly powerful. And you’ll find in a self published book that the subtitle sells better than the actual title. And the subtitle is called “The Secret To Why Buyers Will Happily Pay An Extra 99 Cents Or More For Each Item You Sell.” And as an author you really wan to focus on your title and subtitle and you need a title that is kind of catchy, that people will catch their eye, but that’s as far as that will go. The subtitle really explains what your book is about. That’s just a little extra tip for your audience.
BEN: It’s like any ad—at least like what Gary Bencivenga or Clayton Makepeace—you look at their ads, they have that one little short power statement, and then they explain it in the deck under that. And it’s very similar to that.
GREG: It’s very similar to that and I find it works well on eBooks. So anyway, you go to our about me page and it tells about us, my wife and I and our little eBay business. It also has links to the newspaper articles that I published on eBay and some eBay guides and just tells us a little bit more. You asked about me and that’s what it is. I don’t believe we sell anything on that page but it just offers lots of information for anyone who’s interested.
BEN: Well Greg, you’ve been extremely generous with your knowledge here and I really want to thank you for doing this because you’ve helped me out in so many different ways. And I wanted my listeners to have that same advantage. So thank you very much.
GREG: Well thank you. It’s really been a blast talking with you.
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