Paul Teague is a successful non-fiction author and host of the Self-Publishing Journeys Podcast. He is now attempting to move solely into writing in fiction, which is where his passion lies.
How To
Self-Publishing for Profit
One distinct trend is that there seem to be distinct themes in terms of self-publishing books, self-publishing for profit and self-publishing for quality.
While these two aims aren’t mutually exclusive, there are definitely two schools of thought regarding self-publishing, those people who want to self-publish books to make money and those who want to self-publish to create a really fantastic product. This is subtly different from the distinction between business and a hobby. To achieve complete success on either path then you will need to run your self-publishing exercise like a business, but to begin with the hobbyist path provides an opportunity to try things out and achieve initial success.
In this episode I consider what I’ve learned in terms of self-publishing for profit, that is the objective of making money from self-publishing books.
As any half-decent business person knows, you make a profit by earning more money than you pay in costs (in strictly accounting terms this is actually cashflow, but in layman terms this is correct). So to self-publish for profit we need to ensure we pay as low costs as possible and make as much money as possible.
Was I Wrong about Fiction Book Content Marketing?
I’ve recently started to wonder if my view that content marketing doesn’t work for marketing fiction books is actually wrong. I never tried it; I thought about it but decided against it.
What is content marketing?
For those of you who are wondering what content marketing is : it is basically creating some form of regular content, usually a blog, video channel or a podcast with the aim of attracting an audience of people who will ultimately buy your books.
So rather than paying for services where you make use of someone else’s audience (basically advertising) you build up your own audience by attracting them to your regular content. That’s the idea.
For non-fiction books it is usually very easy to do this, most have a specific set of questions that they answer and so you can create content that answers those question, the idea of “they ask, you answer.” For fiction you can’t use this approach, but I’ve started to think that there is still benefit from blogging or podcasting.
Marketing Using Pinterest With Jeff Sieh
This week I talk to Jeff Sieh, an awesome man with a beard, general nice guy and Pinterest expert. He’s the host of the Manly Pinterest Tips Podcast and manages the Pinterest and Instagram pages for Social Media Examiner, arguably the most influential Social Media Marketing blog in the world.
Creating a CreateSpace Paperback-Ready Word Document from Scrivener
In this episode I take you through a process I have recently worked out to almost be able to create a CreateSpace paperback-ready word document from Scrivener using it’s compile settings. If it wasn’t almost then I would be creating a PDF directly from Scrivener and not using Word at all. However at least on the Windows version of Scrivener (which has less features than the Mac version) it doesn’t seem possible to create the file directly from Scrivener. That said I quite like the fact that I have a final document which I can compile and amend as I need.
Building up a Twitter Following Fast
In this episode I talk about a repeat of an experiment I performed when I started self-publishing, that is building up a Twitter following relatively quickly. In under 6 months I’ve built up my following on the Begin Self-Publishing Twitter account (beginsppodcast) to over a 1000 followers, taking about 10 minutes a day on a normal day doing this. I am still building up followers on my main Stoneham Press account as well, which has now over 4500 followers in just under 2 years. I soon worked out that you can do this with relatively small amounts of work if you use the right tools.