How To Publish Your Book On Amazon For 99

How To Publish Your Book On Amazon For $99

A long time ago, on a desktop far, far away...

Who hasn't dreamed of not only writing their own book, but seeing it in print on Amazon.com, having a copy for their bookshelf, buying 'five copies for my mother?'

Well, now you can do it for a $99 fee and some cybernetic elbow grease. This page will show you how I did it, and chances are you can do it too. I've been reading for several years about Print On Demand, the nifty new techology where you put in PDF files on one end (One for the cover, one for the insides) and a beautiful, perfect-bound, bookstore-quality book comes out the other. I've even seen the technology in action at an document imaging tradeshow (that's my profession, by the way.)

I've known other people who have used Print On Demand (POD) as a way to self-publish, including my own father. My problem with that is I have no room in my garage for books, I don't want to get involved in the process of selling and shipping books, handling returns, etc.

Suddenly, while Googling something a week ago, I stumbled on some fantastic Goo. Amazon, the online bookstore, has absorbed a POD publisher named BookSurge, making it a separate Amazon division. Now I could take my book project, upload it to Amazon/BookSurge, pay a fee, and VOILA! my book is on Amazon for everyone to buy. It ships within 48 hours, BookSurge pays me a 25% royalty within 60 days, I can even buy five copies for my mother at a discount!

I emailed BookSurge and was assigned an account manager, who I will call Joseph (since his name is Joseph). I inquired about the details of publishing a book. For $599 I could get the hand-holding, send us your manuscript version of the publishing, or if I was brave, courageous, and could format my own PDFs, for $99 I could use the Author's Express program to upload my book projects.

Since my book creation project was designed to be the forerunner of many more titles, $99 seemed like the way to go.

I ran all over the site, downloading example PDFs, submission guidelines, and anything else I could find. The site recomends using Adobe -something or another- for text formating, and Adobe Acrobat 6 (not 7!) for PDF creation.

I decided from the git-go that Microsoft Word and PDF Factory Pro would have to work for me, since that is what I had on my desktop, and I don't want to spend weeks learning yet another desktop publishing application, although I am sure it is a good one.

Besides, I was already thinking about writing this page, and I wanted to come up with a process most anyone would be comfortable with.

The only real shortcut I took is that my cover is plain text, with no images on it. I figured my first book is going to sell mostly if not entirely on Amazon, and a pretty cover is not that important there. In any case, I can always go back and upgrade my edition (The additional fee for resubmitting either the interior or the cover is $50, once the book is published.)

Sample files and a complete step by step description of how I formatted and published my three books (so far!) is at www.actasif.com/bookproject

BONUS : How To Reach Thousands Of Your Ideal Clients And Customers And Skyrocket Your E-mail List

One of the questions I’m asked the most by my clients is, “How can I most quickly build my e-mail list?”

My answer is, find someone who’s already reaching your target market in droves, and use THEM to build your list! How? With these three easy steps:

STEP 1: Determine exactly who your ideal client or customer is.

The more descriptive you can be here, the better. For example, don’t just think “men”. Think “men ages 18-40 who like sports and working out”. Don’t just think “small business owners”. Think “women owners of professional service businesses that do less than $1 million a year”.

Can you take on clients or customers who fall outside of this description? Of course! But you need to know who you’re going after.

Example: About three years ago, I spent a romantic summer week on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. My beau was wonderful in letting me decide most of the activities we’d do each day. But there was one thing he definitely wanted to do at least once - go bluefishing!

Now I’m not sure if you could have guessed this, but I’m not really into fishing. ; )

But hey, I’ll try anything once, so off we went to the docks. Now, I figured we could go on any boat with any captain and do this. But no … we went with “Captain Dan the Bluefish Man” (who smelled like his specialty). Dan took us on his special boat to this special place off the island where the bluefish were, and we even used special bait that the bluefish liked. And we had great success - they just kept biting!

I realized that if you know exactly what you’re going after, you’re much more likely to get it. The same goes for reaching your target market.

STEP 2: Find other people, companies, or websites that are ALREADY reaching your target market en masse.

Sit down with a cup of coffee this weekend and do some online research regarding your target market. What sites are they already visiting? What newsletters or magazines do they already read? For example, if your target market is stay-at-home moms, find the most popular sites they visit. Find the most popular ezines they read.

Come up with a list of your top five websites and top five ezines that are already reaching your ideal client or customer.

STEP 3: Contact these websites and ezines and see if they will:

REVIEW your book, products, services, or ezine for their readers. If so, send them a review copy and follow up a week or two later. Request that when they run the review they mention your e-zine and direct people to your website to sign up.

accept guest ARTICLES. If so, then submit one of your best, with a short bio that links people back to your website to sign up for your ezine.

SWAP ads or recommendations for each other’s websites, products, or services. If you have an ezine that reaches the same target market they want to reach, this is a great win-win.

do a CO-REGISTRATION deal. If you already have a good amount of e-zine subscribers and website traffic, they may be open to adding your e-zine to their ezine signup form if you do the same on your part. (Ideally folks should just check a box to subscribe to the additional e-zine automatically.)

run a recommendation or ad in exchange for a COMMISSION on resulting sales. For example, you give them the ad to run, tagged with a link that lets you know if any sales come from it. (This is easy for you to do if you have an online affiliate program.*)

accept PAID advertising. Banner ads, text ads, and other paid placements obviously cost you money, but if it’s your only option and you really want to reach these folks, go for it. But be sure to track your results so you can see if it’s working. (You’ll need a link tracking program to do this.*)

And these are just a FEW ideas to get you started!

Remember, your #1 goal is to get people back to your site to sign up for your e-zine or other email list, because THAT is how you guarantee the chance to market to them repeatedly!