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Maximize Your Self-Publishing Royalties
Presented by Larry Blumsack, Monday, October 17, 2011
Larry Blumsack, author of Face-to-Face is the Ultimate Social Media (a person's quest to be best at sales), shares his successful self-publishing strategies:
Blumsack "talked his book" via Dragon Voice Recognition Software by Nuance, which allowed him to capture his engaging story-telling "voice." The software immediately and accurately transferred his spoken words into written words. That "first draft" took him just five or six hours. Editing it took several months. He hired a professional editor to ensure a quality product.
To ascertain that his book offered what his intended audience wanted, Blumsack recruited a "focus group" of ten people who agreed to give him frank feedback. The group included CEOs, women, people of color, and students, providing him with a broad base of opinions. To determine the price of his book, he perused, at bookstores, published books with similar titles and of similar size.
He engaged a designer he has worked with for a number of projects to do both cover and layout, after getting bids from professionals whom he found on elance.com, guru.com, and freelancer.com.
He used the Harvard Bookstore's book machine to print 20 copies clearly marked "galley" (cost:" $75 for setup or more if you make changes, plus $7.50 to print each copy of the 104-page, 30,000-word paperback). He sent these to "name" people (Daniel Pink, Evelyn Murphy, Jeff Taylor), asking for testimonials. Each time he got a testimonial, he quoted it in the next letter he sent; thus increasing his credibility. He was then able to put seven blurbs on the final book's back cover, and many more in three pages of testimonials at the start of the book.
He used Lightning Source (an Ingram company) as a printer and distributor. Cost of the final printing: He submitted completed PDF files to Lightning Source: setup cost him $37.50 for content and $37.50 for cover (more if you need to make changes). The initial proof copy was sent overnight at no charge. Royalties are $2.52.
His cost to purchase books from Lightning Source to sell on his own is $2.52 per book. Books are available within 6-8 weeks in the entire Ingram distribution network in the U.S., U.K, and Europe.
Blumsack also published his book through CreateSpace, Amazon's POD company, which has NO setup costs when you provide your own files for the cover and text. and which got his book on Amazon within 5 days of proof approval. He signed up for the eStore/Amazon Pro Plan, which gives him a royalty of $5.62, instead of the "standard" plan under which the royalty is only $4.11. Amazon's Expanded Distribution Plan drops royalties to $3.12, so he used Lightning Source for the expanded distribution.
He joined Amazon's "affiliate program," which gives him more income by placing an Amazon link on his website so visitors to his site can easily purchase the book.
His book (submitted as a Word pdf) is also available on Kindle,
and on Nook, where his ebook sells for $4.95 and he gets 75% royalties.
Total cost of getting his book out under his own imprint (Zoka Institute LLC) was $1000. He credits the union's online forum NWU-Book
as a valuable source of information that he used throughout the self-publishing process.
As an experienced public speaker who also does trainings in sales, coaching, speaking and consulting, Blumsack has ready-made venues where he can sell Face-to-Face is the Ultimate Social Media (storyline: a person's quest to be best at sales). Visit www.larryblumsack.com.
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