Podcast 11 - Tip Tuesday - Five Steps and Insight for Getting Your Book Created and Published with Rachel RofƩ
As some of you are embarking on your business journey, a book might be the furthest thing from your mind. Instead, you should really move it more to the front because it could actually help you propel your business. Rachel Rofé of RachelRofe.com came to talk to us about five simple steps to getting your book from an idea to into the hands of your potential clients. (If you have any more interest on this topic, Rachel offers a great class with even more details about how you can get your book written quickly and great promotions. You can find out more info here: Kindle Class.)
How does writing a book improve your business? It helps to get you in front of people (for example, on Amazon) that you may not have gotten in front of before every writing that book. It also puts you immediately in that expert category once you have something published. It's instant credibility.
It’s also great if you're starting a business to be able to take a bunch of ideas that you may have and make something that’s coherent.
How Rachel got started – Rachel got into the publishing world after she had a contest with her business partner to see who could do more with products that they hadn't yet developed. They were about who would make more money in a short time frame. Rachel decided to try a book on Kindle for her niche and within the first month made over $1600 and an additional $3000 the next month. So she realized not only was it a good way to bring in business, but it also brought in extra income too! And she never looked back.
Rachel laid out five steps that we need to do in order to create, publish, and promote our books.
Step 1 – Create the Outline
Rachel is all about ease. What she first does is looks through Amazon to find the top 20 books on a topic that she wants to cover. Amazon will tell you the best-seller ranking for that book.
She’ll then open each book (that is ranked high), and click on the 'take a look inside' link to read the table of contents. This lets her see what a particular book has covered. From there, she’ll also check out the reviews to see specifically what people really liked about the book. She’ll then develop her entire outline based on those things.
How do you set the number of chapters? It usually ends up being about 8-14. It really depends because she wants to be as thorough as possible without giving people too much, just to pop up the fluff factor.
If you’re trying to determine the topic to write about, you can either select something you’re passionate about, or that is related to your business. Or if you’re writing the books strictly for profit, then find the more high dollar books on Kindle (usually around $9.99) and figure out what key words that are highly searched and the topic people are really seeking.
Step 2 – Writing The Book
So one of the easiest ways Rachel suggest writing a book is to first take your outline, and then open up a program such as Audacity, and then just start spewing your words in a recording. You don’t have to worry about sounding perfect, you just have to worry about getting everything recorded.
Then she suggests sending it to a transcriber for clean-up. You can either hire strictly a transcriber who will solely go word for word on what you said, or you can hire someone who will not only transcribe but will clean up the content for you too.
When it comes to finding transcribers, Rachel recommends a girl who does both transcribing and cleaning up. You can find her at [email protected]. (And PS mention Rachel sent you.)
For smaller transcriptions, you can use something like Fiverr.
Another way you can move forward with a book without having to do a lot of writing is to have contributors to a specific topic. If you already have a client base, Rachel likes to do things like run a contest and offer up a spot in the book, for let's said the top 10 entries.
If you don’t have a large audience, you can go out to places like Craigslist and find contributors that way. Most people are not even worried about a link back to their business, they’re just so happy to have their name published in a book.
Step 3 - Editing
You can either hire someone to do the editing for you, or do it yourself, but either way, editing is a must. You can also hire the job to someone else (always good to have more eyes on it). If you hire a ghostwriter to write the book, more than likely it will be edited. However, if you go straight for a transcriber, they more than likely, won't also do the editing part for you.
Step 4 - Publishing
Although there's nothing wrong with shooting for The New York Times Best Sellers' List, you'll be waiting a lot longer to hold that copy of your published book in your hand if you're going to do that. (Plus, it's harder to have a publishing firm sign you on and harder to make money).
So self-publishing is the way you'll want to go if you want to get something up fast.
You’ll need to get the formatting correct, and can find how to format your book on Amazon. Rachel also shared with us a great product she developed that can take your book and format it, Kindle-style in just a few moments. You can find more about it here: Kinstat Formatter
Are there other areas where you can publish your book? Yes, Sony has one, along with Nook and Apple. Amazon does offer something where for the first 90 days if you won’t publish anywhere else but Amazon, they’ll let you offer your book for free. Rachel does stress that taking advantage of the free kindle book can really help start promoting you as a writer, and get your name out there.
Amazon also has a program called Createspace, which will let you create an actual physical copy of your book.
Step 5 – Promoting
Sites like goodreads.com can be a great place for customers. You can start building a report with the readers, and even add an author page for your book.
Make sure you’re asking for reviews from your readers. You can even put it in the back of your book. If you want to ask friends and family to review your book, you can have them enter your keywords in the title of the review, to get you ranked higher.
ACX.com is a place where you can upload your book and have someone else record your book. You can actually have a professional voice record your book! Instead of paying them, you can just offer to split the commissions with them.
More About Rachel: Rachel Rofé is a multiple bestselling author that's been featured in Entrepreneur, Woman's World, and Fox News. Since she began internet marketing in 2006, she's developed over 30 products, 40 Kindle books, and bought and sold companies with as many as 120+ employees. She speaks nationwide about copywriting, book creation, outsourcing, and product creation. And her favorite part: she does all of this while living the "internet lifestyle", traveling the world and having fun.