Your Books

If you have written a book, that is fantastic! A website will help you promote it and make people aware of its existence.
Unfortunately, there are only a handful of authors that are making a decent living from their writing. Even the richest author of our times, J, K. Rowling made most of her money from the derivative products (games, attraction parks, movies etc) than from the book royalties themselves. Take a moment to think about that if you thought you would retire on your book royalties.

The few authors like James Patterson, Stephen King, Danielle Steele etc who are making a decent living with their books seem to be pumping them at an extremely high rate of two to four books per year.

Most authors I know take more than one year to write their book, some take decades!

Even if you self-publish, the hard part of selling your book was not to write it. You need to promote it like there is no tomorrow.

A book well-written will give you credibility for people visiting your website but most often, will not provide a decent living for you.

There are between 600 000 to one million books published every year in the USA alone.

Now, here is the sad part, generally speaking most authors will sell less than 250 copies of their books (and that includes their family and neighbors).

(I actually find that little guy funny. Did you see the water pouring from his eyes?)

I must caution you on those publishing houses asking for money. They ask for huge amounts of money and most authors that I know who used such services lost fortunes and had to give away their books in the end.

If you want to self-publish, Amazon has a great self-publishing program https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

The beauty of their program is that it is print on demand so you could technically order one copy of your book for yourself and be content that you are now a published author!

What if writing is not your strength?

I have read many of the books promising to write your book in one week or less and most were total garbage.

The one trick that was of some value is to write the chapter’s titles first and then put the meat on the bone after. That way of writing provides you with an interesting mind map.

If you are better at talking than writing, you could use some speech to text software. Many free if you do a Google search, some like Nuance (formally Dragon Naturally Speaking) cost an investment.

My experience with the speech to text software was that with my accent (my primary language is French) the text that came out was either unusable or right out offensive. I also realized that I write faster than I speak and in a clearer manner.

My friends from South Florida also have very weird speech to text conversations on Facebook.

I would advise if you want to go the speech to text route to try out a free online version. Google has one.

You might have come across those SPECIAL REPORTS that are basically transcripts of an interview an internet “guru” did with a friend marketer with the hmm and e.. and (inaudible). These are actually hurting your reputation as they are worthless products. You don’t want to be that guy!

Another solution is to hire a ghostwriter. Honestly though, the affordable ones give you books that you would not be proud of. And the good ones know their worth and will charge you for it.

There are some interesting ghostwriters on Fiverr and I found a very decent and affordable editor there.

Is a book useless then?

A book has some value in your internet marketing venture if you can write it fast enough that it does not take all your time.

You have to be aware that it’s all in the marketing. I often hear in the Facebook authors’ group “My book is amazing! I will have to chose my publisher!” Every decent author thinks their book is a masterpiece…but it is not.

And even if your book is a solid read, you will need to break through the noise of the million other new books by marketing it.

The sad truth is that books on Amazon that have no review are not shown by Amazon in the results so you need to get reviews.

Most authors that I know who did free giveaways of their books got hundreds if not thousands of downloads (which they did not get paid for because it was free) and got a handful of reviews in return.

You have to be very careful to respect Amazon’s terms of service for reviews not to have your book banned. Such terms are (but not limited to) no review swaps, not allowed to pay for reviews, no person from your household can post a review etc etc)

You can read Amazon’s review policy by clicking here

Click on the image below to get access to a legit review service where you can review books and your book gets reviewed. You also get a 15% discount. They do charge a low monthly fee.

Their service is good and they respect to the dot Amazon’s terms of services. They even have an option where you can cancel your reading assignment for any reason. I cancel my book assignment (and just get another one) when I feel I cannot give more than a 3 stars reviews. after all, as authors, we have to support each other but I am not going to lie about a book as I feel my reviews are to guide other readers.

When I feel like I could not read and review another book, I remind myself what one of my mentors said:”When you get to 100 Amazon reviews, that’s when the magic starts to happen!”

Yes, I have self-published some books on Amazon. I admit the feeling of holding the book you wrote yourself is fantastic and my non-fiction book has landed me lots of radio and podcasts interviews.

Here are some of my books available on Amazon. If you do publish, making your book available on Kindle unlimited will give you a couple of dollars extra. Amazon makes it very simple to join the Kindle Unlimited program when you upload your book.

The Reading Glasses Lie — My non-fiction book on how you do not need reading glasses after the age of forty

My children’s book in honor of my father (I even self-illustrated and it shows)

A book I entered in the Kindle India contest

I just love penguins and it shows!

and many more…

Here is your call to action

So many people have parts of books written on their computer that they never got around to complete. Is this your case? Are you almost done? Many you need to take a week-end to finish your book? Maybe you need to hire an editor to finish your book?

If you decide not to complete your book for whatever reason, maybe you can use the content as blog posts?

How to use your book to grow your online business?

I attended a teleseminar (It’s like a webinar without the pictures. 🤣) and got an Ah-ha moment when the speaker said:” You can repurpose your book to do blog posts, snippets on social media, create videos (it takes me 5 minutes to do a video with text to voice), giveaway one chapter, etc

The beauty of using parts of your book is that it is fresh and good quality content.

You can message me if you have questions or comments by clicking on the contact us button at the bottom of the homepage.

Well, congratulations. You get to advance to the next square!

See you on the Next Square!