 eight steps to successfully publishing your own book, step-by-step guide. Hey guys, JR Fisher here, and I wanna talk to you about books. Now, most of us have at least entertained the thought of maybe writing a book one day, but what if you actually could do it? I mean, the traditional way of writing a book was that you had to come up with an idea and write an entire book and send it off to a bunch of publishers, and then those publishers would tell you how to change your book. If they even looked at your submission, and then if you got that far, then you would have to negotiate what it was gonna be worth and the small amount of money that you would get in return for it, and it just wasn't a dream. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare to write a book. Unless you had some big name, it was really tough to get a book deal. But all of that has changed. You can now self-publish a book. And in this video, I wanna walk you through step-by-step exactly what you need to do so that you can become successful at publishing your own book. Hey, don't forget to subscribe to this channel. Hit that subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray, and don't forget, ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live, or if I upload a new video. All right, let's get right into it. Let's go through all the steps. So at the end of this video, you're gonna know exactly what to do to be successful at publishing your own book. Okay, let's talk about step one. Step one is write a book that people wanna read. Okay, this is really important. I think a lot of us forget about that. We have some idea, and we say, well, this is my idea, this is what I wanna get out there. But do people really wanna read what your idea is? It's fine to come up with an idea, but that's just gonna be the beginning of your research. What you're gonna wanna do is go into the market. You're gonna look and see what books are already out there. See what books are doing well, which ones are New York Times bestsellers, which books are successful. When you do that and you do your research and you see your competition out there, it's gonna guide you in what direction you need to go. Now you may look in your niche and see all this information, but there's a piece missing. A part of it people haven't talked about, and that may be the little kernel that you need of success to get you going. So you wanna do your research first. Make sure you're gonna write a book that people are gonna wanna read. Number two, do professional editing. Your book has to be edited professionally. Yes, I know that not every part of your grammar is gonna be perfect, but you've gotta try because you gotta understand you're out there competing in the market with other books that are gonna be similar to yours. So you wanna be as professional as you possibly can. I totally suggest that you hire a professional editor, and there's a lot of sites you can do that from, but professional editing is really going through that book line by line by line so that the readability of your book is gonna be really good and people will continue to read it, which will make your book sell. So let's look at some of the places you can go hire somebody to edit your book. Now the first place I'm gonna tell you to look is Readsie.com Readsie. Readsie is a marketplace that helps match editors with potential book publishers. And in doing so, they can help you edit your book. It's a great site to go to. It's been around for a long time now, and it gets good results. So I would highly suggest you go there. The next place you could go to is Upwork.com. I've used Upwork for years. I really like it. And you can find book editors there. Make sure you check references though, since Upwork is not necessarily a book editing site. It is just a site with freelancers on it. Make sure whoever you've selected has some good credentials and some reviews that actually match up to them actually being able to do the job. The next one I would tell you about is Fiverr.com. Fiverr.com once again is another one that's kind of like Upwork. But you can find book editors there, but it's not just about book editors. There's all kinds of different freelancers on that site. So you're gonna wanna check out the individuals really closely before you hire anybody. Number three, create an eye-catching and inspiring book cover. Oh my gosh, book covers are so important. I mean, we've all heard the saying don't judge a book by its cover. But unfortunately, that's exactly what people do. They do judge things by the cover. So you've gotta have a good cover. Now, unless you're an extremely creative person and you know exactly how to do this, I don't suggest you doing this on your own. It doesn't cost that much to have somebody design a book cover when they do a really good book cover. It could return itself a thousand fold. So it's really important that you do this. Now, you can go to some of the same sites I mentioned earlier. You can go to ReadZ, you can go to Upwork, you can go to Fiverr, you can go to Freelancer.com. There's so many different places you can go to have this done. But guys, I can't impress this upon you enough. It doesn't matter how good your book is, doesn't matter how helpful it is, none of that matters if you have a bad book cover and nobody wants to buy the book. And step four is decide on how you're gonna do your printing of your book. Now, there's a lot of companies out there that do this. However, I'm gonna recommend in this video that you use Kindle Direct Publishing. Kindle Direct Publishing is a branch of Amazon.com and at the time of this recording, they owned about 50% of the self-publishing market so they really know what they're doing. As far as the amount of money you can make, generally you're gonna get about a 60% royalty. They do have a calculator on their site to show you how much you will make. I'll put that on the screen here. All you do is pop in what kind of book it is, number of pages, all that good stuff and it will calculate about how much you're gonna make based on the price of your book. Now, the only downside to using Kindle Direct Publishing is that if you're selling e-books, you have to sign an exclusivity contract with them so it can only be sold on their site. Now, the printed version of your books, which Amazon can also do for you, you can buy those and you can sell those on any site you want, but it's just the e-books that can only be sold on Amazon. Now, you can also have yours printed through Lulu and integrate it through Shopify. That is the main integration for e-books online with Shopify and you can go to their site and hook that up and sell it that way if you want. And number five is formatting your book correctly. This is really important, guys. You've got to get this right. You have to have your title pages, right? Your chapter pages, all your margins. There's a lot of help online. I'll put a link in the description as to how to format your book so you can kind of read about that, but this is super important that your book is formatted correctly or it can't be printed. Number six is launch your book just like a product launch. This is really important, guys, that people know about it. They understand your book. They can get some samples of it. And the best way to do this is to set up a web page. Now, you can do a very basic web page, but you wanna make sure when they come to that web page, they have a way of opting in to get them on your list so you can remark it to them if they don't buy the book. You wanna have the about us page and about the author type page. And maybe a few sample pages they can actually read of the book and to continue on, they're gonna have to click a button to actually purchase the book. So it's really important that you have some resource page like a web page that they can go to and buy your book or get more information about it. Step seven is market your book on social media. This is so important, guys. Get out there on your Instagram, your Facebook, your LinkedIn, whatever pages you have on social media and start talking about your book. Hold up your book so people can see it if you're doing videos. Take pictures of you and the book. Talk to people who do podcasts. Try to get on podcasts and talk about the book. These interviews shows need people to talk to on a regular basis. So when you contact them with your idea, if you contact enough of them, you will get interviews on your book. So it's really important to do that. You're gonna have to do a lot of the legwork. Keep in mind you've decided to self publish so you don't have a publishing company marketing your book for you, which they don't really do that good of a job anyhow. But the point is you're gonna have to do all of this on your own. So make sure you're prepared to do so and you work hard at it. And step number eight, you're not gonna like this. You're not gonna like this at all. Start on your next book. That's right. As soon as you finish one book, it's a good idea to start on the next one because that's gonna keep you on a roll. And the more books you have out there guys, the more reputable it makes you look, the more intelligent it makes you look. It shows people that you're a professional at this and this is what you do. I know people who have literally written hundreds of e-books. I met a guy on one of my trips and he literally makes a living off these e-books because he's done hundreds of them on all kinds of different subjects and he's known for that. These little altitude books. Now your book may not fall into that niche but the point is the more you publish, the more you get out there, the better off you're gonna do. I've already done a couple e-books and some printed books and I gotta tell you, my wife has too, I gotta tell you it's a great thing. It's a great thing to have out there. It's a great calling card if nothing else. When you meet somebody, give them one of your books. It doesn't cost you hardly anything. And if you give them a business card, they're pretty much gonna throw it away. You're guaranteed of that. But they can't throw away a book for some reason. Even if they don't read it, they'll probably have it on their desk somewhere and they'll see it and they'll remember you. So having a book is a really great idea. I hope this helps you out. You still may have some questions on the subject and if you do, do me a favor, put it in the comments section below. I love to get your questions. I love to have your input. So if you just wanna say hello or whatever you'd like to do, put that in the comments section below. In addition to that, I have a free course below. It's a $97 course but for a limited time, it's limited. You can get it for free. Just click on the link in the description below. No credit card is required. Guys, thanks so much for watching this video. I really appreciate it. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. Let me give you a second here to subscribe. And in the meantime, I will show you a picture of a really cute little bird. See there? Look at that. Isn't that worth subscribing for? All right, thank you so much for subscribing. Don't forget to ring the bell. 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