When you set any kind of giant goal, the reality of the situation will eventually hit you. Luckily for us, these last two weeks have the seen the publications of our favorite two books (Sales and Marketing Success and Authority Marketing Manual) thus far, we continued negotiations on a “traditional publishing” book deal and made some additional sales of current products that we sell (blog and social media setup).
Overall, life is VERY good right now!
As you may have noticed, we moved the updates about writing non-fiction ebooks over here from our Marketing and Media Monsters website. And I guess I forgot to add to our amazing life list that we launched the Non Fiction Marketing site this week.
The reason for this site is two fold. We are super enthralled with non fiction writing right now as we are learning the ins and outs of the marketplace. We feel like there is a hole in the market where no one is really talking consistently about publishing non-fiction and we are looking to jump in when we feel like have something to add. Also, our MandM site was slowly creeping towards a non-fiction marketing site and that is not the purpose of it! We want to provide great industry related marketing information, NOT turn it into our own little self publishing empire!
Let’s get the specifics out of the way first…
Total Sales
- Sales and Marketing Success – 8 Sales
- Authority Marketing Manual – 6 Sales
- Becoming An Authority – 12 Sales
- Real Estate Agent Selling Tips – 14 Sales
- How To Succeed At Stock Photography – 20 Sales
So we did have Becoming An Authority on a Twitter ad rotation, but never did it for the Authority Marketing Manual or Sales and Marketing Success. Interesting. Not something we are willing to bank on at this point, but clicks are pretty darn cheap on Twitter right now so will probably get both of those on some kind of click through campaign.
YAY! Our total sales numbers are going up for all of the books and again, it is just time that is making the difference in the total number of product sales. We haven’t really run any free or $.99 specials to drive numbers (and not sure we are ever going to).
That said, we did have a small seminar/networking type meetup last Friday and handed out flyers with a direct link to our Sales and Marketing Success ebook. THAT could have made a bit of a difference.
The Grind
So this week at one of our meetings Tara was all festive talking about how she loves “the grind”. For her, the cool thing about publishing books is that the sales are cumulative, the more people who buy the more other people are exposed to your work and the more books you have, the more potential sales you could make.
Because we are using the Kindle platform exclusively right now, it is easy to track sales numbers and see that older books are doing better than newer books (even though the oldest one has one bad review).
This is GREAT news. It means that if we continue to grind out a book a week for year, never wavering and we use the number of sales of just 10 per month for each title, at the end of the year we will be making $1,000-ish a month doing nothing at all but selling the books already in the system.
But what if we do some marketing? Some cross promoting and adding to our mailing list. Heck, what if we send an email out to our current mailing list about “buy our book”…now we wouldn’t do that, but we could. How about putting links to our books in the sidebars of all of our blogs.
There seem to be a million different ways we could market our books and we are going to test each and every one!
Well I am off now to finish publishing this week’s book. The cover is done, description written and all I am waiting for right now is the final edits back from Rebekah! This book publishing business is FUN!!!
Cool Cover
One last thing, we had what we think is the coolest cover ever for an ebook with the fun little guys and softer friendlier look. Well Tara’s husband was overwhelmingly in favor of that cover (which never happens) and Rebekah’s nine year old wanted to know how she could buy the book because she liked the cover so much. It really is the little things that make all the difference!
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