HOW NOT TO PUBLISH A BOOK

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. An unexpected Ebook project and how it got started

3. Welcome to the world of Books

4. The big checklist of tasks which you need to know before you write your next Ebook

5. Choosing a book topic to write about

6. Name it right – What do you want to call your book?

7. Book Covers – The first thing which triggers the sale

8. Editing – Most important thing of all, did you say no, OMG

9. Bulk Up – Feed these fishes 10 times a day, until it grows bigger than that shark I saw last night on TV

10. Formatting – Make me look pretty and prettier

11. Infographics – Although it was long, I like your presentation, but for god’s sake can you please summarize it in a few lines.

12. Icons - Those little inky pinky things which always look cute

13. Copyright – An Indirect way of saying that not to follow the instructions and a direct way of saying not to copy the information

14. Copywriting – The most secret, highest quality information which you ever read in your life. Want more sales-ey writing? Then read more.

15. Fiverr – One stop website for all [most] your needs

16. Platform to sell – Hello Mr. I saw your golden eggs, where can I buy them?

17. Expenses – Do I really need to spend this much for this little book?

18. Advertising & Marketing – I have little golden eggs which I want to sell, could you please help people buy them?

19. Sad part – Don’t cry that hard, you are not alone.

20. Conclusion - I swear these 4 months were the most painful thing which has happened to me apart from those pimples which formed on my a**.

INTRODUCTION

What if one day God gave you a white sheet of paper saying write down your future the way you want to see it in less than 100 words?

What would you write? Think.

As you are thinking, you can read what I would have written.

“A big jungle something like the Amazon. No people, only nature in its purest, wildest form.

Me on a tree house with a nice bed, a lot of books, a cold breeze of air and some nice tea and snacks to eat, drink and read, just reading and writing until those tired eyes lay down to take rest. Maybe one night’s sleep, or forever. “

If you ask why I wrote the above lines, below is my own weird explanation.

Who wants to be part of this rat race? This crowded world where everything is measured and where you are just alive and you are not living, you are simply surviving?

I hope one day I disappear from this world.

Note: I am an average Joe who has nothing special to introduce, hence this little story summarizes my state of my mind.

We live every day, and some days in our life form a story which you want to share with the world as much as you can, other days just pass without us even knowing.

Let’s live life for that one story which you would like to share with the world, until then, let this journey of life continue at its own pace. Are you ? Say “Hi” to this life once again.

AN UNEXPECTED EBOOK PROJECT AND HOW IT GOT STARTED

I quit my job last August with the hope of working on Entrepreneurial Ideas.

First on the list was to develop games for the iOS Market. I tried developing on my own and it didn’t work; I realized how hard the learning curve, coding and art assets creation is. I gave up and then at that point came across blogging.

I read a lot about it and started buying domain names after domain names, I mean simple term websites. As of now at this point in time, I have 18 websites and none of them are active.

Tried growing them, but it didn’t work out. Found that we can sell off blogs. Bought a book to know more about it, read it in and out. Listed one of my blogs on Flippa it didn’t get sold, tried again a second time to no success.

A lot was said online about freelancing. I said “okay, at least this should work and this will help me survive.”

Tried freelancing in these areas.

Writing, Whiteboard animation, Infographics creation, Idea generation etc.

That too didn’t work out.

Read numerous money-making ideas and in that search came across Crowdfunding, did all the information collection part and launched a campaign putting whatever I had, yet it didn’t work out.

I hope they have still kept my campaign. Here is the link to it.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/how-to-stay-as-an-entrepreneur-game-art/x/17020116#/

I finally reached a point where I started thinking a lot, for example on what basis or calculation I quit my job. I could not solve that puzzle, I mean literally. I am still amazed that I quit the job so easily.

While I had made up my mind to get back to my job, I said to myself to try something which is not tried; that one last try which you do after multiple failures. For that one last try, I brainstormed with my cousin and sister and decided to launch an Ebook.

The thing is, she had good knowledge on beauty products, skin care, and hair care, and she had enough material collected over 7 years and also plenty of experience trying out different products, as well as the experience of being a part of beauty classes.

With that experience, she took the part of writer/author and I was given the responsibility of taking care of rest of the things.

I didn’t have any idea about Ebook publishing, except that all that needs to be done is to make it look like a book and put it on Amazon. My thought was this: “if she can write and give the book in 10 days, in a week’s time I can make it as an Ebook and we can start selling it within a month.”

In my mind, on paper, we were excited by the possibility of having our own book and being able to sell it.

You might be saying “Haan, you people thought you could sell hundreds of thousands of copies.”

Yes, we were dreaming of selling in hundreds of thousands of copies… who doesn’t dream big?

That one month project took 4 months to reach the so-called completion stage.

A lack of knowledge and quest to make the book as good as possible made us search for all the things that make a book “the book”.

This is my story which shows you all the lessons learnt, stupid things I did, and the happy side of me which finally completed the project.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF BOOKS

When and why I started reading books outside of educational books is really hard to say. However, I did start reading books when I was around 15 years old.

As far as I remember it was my native language books, and the one book which still haunts me to date is a translation of the English books by Mr. Kenneth Anderson on Man-Eating Tigers, true story.

I read it as it was praised a lot by my Dad. I was not expecting much from the book except for a nice story.

It’s not one single book; it’s a series. I don’t remember exactly how many I had or how many I read as what I am speaking about happened around 15 to 20 years ago.

But memories and the impression the book made on me are still there, and there are many instances in the book I still recall vividly, I mean by the mind-drawn pictures.

To date, when I am in an open space which looks similar to a jungle or simply open space with no one around found in eye’s view, with no buildings, that fear still haunts me.

I mean although realistically it is not possible to encounter a tiger or see one in this crowded metropolitan cities, still, the thought of it coming and facing and staring right at me haunts me.

Once in a while, stories in the paper of leopards found here and there cement the fear more inside my mind.

I can say psychologically that thought has filled enough fear in me that automatically it starts haunting me.

I said this to demonstrate the power of a book.

A book can transform your life, give meaning to your life, and change people’s lives. It can make them achieve whatever they want.

Books are read and recommended by people of every walk of life, most of the very successful swear by the books they read and say that they owe a lot to the books.

From that little journey into the world of books, in these 20 years

I have read book on these subjects

A) Personality development

B) Creativity

C) Idea generation

D) Biographies

E) New subject or hobby-related books

F) Blogging-related books

G) Making money

H) Novels

I) Great leaders

J) Motivational

K) Entrepreneurship related

L) Meditation

M) Spirituality

N) Relationships

O) Body language

P) Short stories collections

Etc, the list goes on.

To date, even now if I walk into a bookstore, I experience some joy in browsing books and buying them. Recently, I bought a book by Tim Ferris “Tools of Titans”.

Books are an integral part of one’s life.

Over the years, reading transforms into writing and one day knowingly or unknowingly readers have a book in front of them, not by anybody, but their own.

A truly wonderful feeling to have.

I know you bought this book with the wish to know more about having your own book and selling it or just to read my story of book publishing.

So come on, let’s jump right into the matter.

One thing I want to say is that I will try to give as many real examples as possible so that you can take your book from draft to sale-ready in the shortest possible time (only if you plan and intend to do everything on your own).

I mean, if you say you are going to outsource book writing, if you say you will hire a virtual assistant to take care of rest of the things then I would say it will be like watching a travel adventure on TV. Yes there will be joy, fear, and all emotions involved but the real “feeling” will not be there unless you experience it.

Trust me, if a dumbass like me can write a book and publish it then you have a zillion percent more chance to do it. [I call this killing myself silently and the dictionary calls it Self-sabotaging].

The money which you spend on this book means a lot to me, more than money-wise; I refer to the trust you have put in me to teach you something. Thanks for that. I hope I don’t disappoint you. Still, if you get disappointed then accept my apologies and trust me that this is all I had in my mind. It’s like the flush tank, I have flushed the tank completely but you might feel that still water is there inside, yet I know how empty the tank is.

THE BIG CHECKLIST OF TASKS WHICH YOU NEED TO NOW BEFORE YOU WRITE YOUR NEXT EBOOK

If you ask me for a list of tasks which one needs to be aware of when it comes to having a finished Ebook in Hand? Here you go-

A) Choosing the book to write

B) Naming the book

C) A nice cover design

D) Writing an attractive content page

E) First draft

F) Reading, re-reading, editing

G) Professional editing

H) Formatting of the book

I) Icons / Infographics / Sketches/ Images

J) Examples, stories, proof, data, case studies, quotes

K) Finding the audience

L) A place to put your book so that they can download it

M) Pricing

N) Copywriting

O) Advertising and Marketing

Although the list looks like a monthly shopping grocery list, don’t get scared! It feels daunting while writing your first book, by the time you are into your second book you will be taking care of the list automatically. A few can be skipped based on the type of book.

I will cover each topic in no particular order. Sometimes you will feel that is there is a relationship between the steps and sometimes you don’t. However, there is nothing complex that you won’t be able to figure out automatically.

Example: Without a book name, you can’t hand it over for book cover design.

Another example: Professional Editing comes only after your first draft, rechecking, corrections, and editing performed by yourself.

This way, you will be able to figure out the rough order in which you need to approach it.

It is like jigsaw puzzle, you can try to solve it any way. Some ways will be easier and other ways will be tougher. Again, there is no hard and fast rule and as each jigsaw puzzle is different, so is each book and topic you choose.

To clarify this point, let me elaborate on another example.

Usually, you might feel that it is done in order. Like book name, followed by contents page, followed by first chapter and that way it will end finally on the last page of the book.

Ex: When it comes to movies thinking that the first shot of the movie was shot first and second shot, shot second.

Later one day you read or somebody told you that it doesn’t work like that.

Same goes for the book.

When it came to my sister’s beauty book, first she started writing the book, once the draft was ready, we started thinking of a name for the book. Next icons and infographics came into the picture, while editing was been carried out simultaneously.

Introduction page, copywriting, book cover design all were done after that previous steps. Finally, the formatting was carried out last.

CHOOSING A BOOK TOPIC TO WRITE ABOUT

Tell me what on earth is left which is not written. I mean if you go to a self-help aisle you see a sea of options to choose from. Same goes for most of the subjects, but you can still see a considerable number of books getting published.

Still, as a first-time writer, don’t stress out to take a book out from inside. The normal way people suggest is to list out the things one is good at. Then shortlist one or two out of it, finally deciding on one topic and making it into a book.

Usually, it is like forcing yourself to pee just because the nurse told to do so for the purpose of a urine test.

The solution is just to read on different subjects, to keep reading books or articles. I mean, an inward information flow should be there where you are stuffing information into your mind day after day. One day, that information will pop out as ideas based on the subject you are looking for.

NAME IT RIGHT - WHAT DO YOU WANT TO CALL YOUR BOOK

Hello I am looking for a book

Book Keeper: That’s great sir, which book?

Hmmm, it’s spiritual book, a new one.

Book Keeper: Sir, all new books are showcased at the front.

I mean the book name is hmmm, I am not able to recall, the author is so and so.

Book Keeper: Oh you mean by that author… is this the book you are looking for.

No, I have this, I mean the new one.

Book Keeper: Sir this is the new one.

One minute, let me google it, ah finally I got it, this is the book which I am looking for.

Book Keeper: Let me search the system for you sir. Oh no, it’s not available with us sir.

Okay, the above conversation may look stupid, but this is what really happened to me.

When it came to naming our book, the first thing that came to my mind is that I need to come up with a killer name.

The idea was simple: find some freelancer who could help with coming up with names and get it done.

However, before that, I thought what’s wrong in trying to come up with names by myself?

Just to impress my sister and to kick the creative cells in my mind, I started forcing myself to come up with names.

Finally, we ended up keeping a name which my sister came up with based on numerological calculation.

If you are wondering what names I came up with. Here is the list. Please do read it with a pinch of salt, per se, I mean I haven’t checked whether there are books with these names already in the market or not.

A) Be More Beautiful

B) Beautiful You

C) Golden Glow

D) Pearl Beauty

E) Shine Like A Moon

F) Unmask Your Beauty

G) Spa-like Beauty In Your Hands

H) Skincare Simplified

I) 21st-century Skincare Guide

J) Secrets of Skincare

There are many more; it’s hard to recall all of them and that sheet of paper, god knows where I have kept it.

I’m cursing and blaming myself for this!

Ok before you jump coming up with names. You need to know this. Usually, a book name will have 2 parts. One is the main title and other is a subtitle.

For the beauty book, the book names which I came up with will only qualify as the Main title.

Subtitle usually will say more about the book in one sentence.

Finally, after lot of permutation and combination, we finalized on the below Title and subtitle

TITLE: Beauty Wallet

SUBTITLE: Wallet of beauty treasures to beautify your skin

Free give away book [To know why this came into picture, check out Bulk Up chapter]

TITLE: 50 Tips

SUBTITLE: For those who like to maintain their Youthful Skin and Hair.

Coming to this book, I had the freedom to name whatever I wanted. But I didn’t even try coming up with names for this book. I had a different plan. I wanted the book name to be given by the editor of the book. While giving for editing itself I had put this condition to him and he had agreed to suggest few names.

Here are the 3 book names suggested by him.

1] "How Not to Publish a Book: Our Disastrous Journey Into the World of Publishing"

2] "Memoirs of a Failed Author: How I Learned to Publish"

3] "How to Publish A Successful Book: A Story of Trial, Error, and Redemption"

I combined Title 1 with subtitle 3 and named this book.

One thing to note is the Title given by the editor is far good compared to the names which I came up with for the Beauty Wallet book [That’s the difference between professional and an Amateur in most of the fields]

Here are my 2 cents.

Unless you have some particular book name in mind and don’t want to deviate at all from it then I would say stick to it. If not it is always better to go for suggestions from the editor or copywriter.

BOOK COVER - THE FIRST THING WHICH TRIGGERS THE SALE

A Little introduction to the book which I worked on.

It's beauty related book. To summarize the book, it has the below things

A) A lot of tips on skincare, addressing common skin problems, advising the right products to be used by the right skin types and also advice based on the season.

B) There are 90 icons of Ingredients and products to please readers’ eyes

C) 4 Infographics explaining some key things

D) 2 Homemade recipes for glowing skin

E) One bonus book containing “50 tips book” along with the main book

So now you have some idea about the book which I worked on.

Okay, coming to the topic at hand.

Book covers are what you see first. I mean be it in websites like Amazon or in paper or in any form of advertising for that matter.

Okay, when it came to deciding a book cover, our first approach was to come up with ideas based on our imagination.

That was again based on the book name we wanted to keep.

Initially to our liking and based on the feedback the name which was finalized was “Unmask Your Beauty”.

So obviously my thinking for this book cover was stirred on the same lines.

My idea was to have a pitch dark painting or background and a beautiful girl coming out of it, like half of her face out of that black color showing her beautiful skin.

Later there came a time where book name kept changing, hopping from this name to that name based on every piece of feedback.

We went to bookstores to look out for covers which grabbed our attention.

We were looking for things which were holding our attention.

Based on my observations, these things on the cover made us spend more time on it

A) Color – Bright ones like Blue, Orange or Red

B) Font – 3D effect type of font

C) Style – simple looking covers, I mean nothing more than just a few words.

We got some idea of what needed to be done.

The next task was to find an image for the book.

Not an easy task. There are many stock image websites wherein you will find millions of images. Choosing one is very difficult unless you have some carefully-set filter criteria.

Also don’t just go by the image, not all images go well as book covers. This we realized when we handed over a super-looking red girl image for making a cover.

We got around 10 different combinations of background color and text color done to go with the image, and somehow nothing worked out and we had to let go of the image.

Also, don’t choose one image, have a few handy. If you don’t like the book cover based on the image chosen, you need not go back again to search for the image; you can hand over the next chosen image.

Why did I say this story? The reason is that in a lot of places you will end up doing the same task again and again. Repetition of the task will kill your time, and the more energy you spend on each task the less you will have to complete the book.

The image was chosen by me and handed over to my sister for shortlisting. Finally, we settled on a book cover which was all chosen by my sister.

Wonder how it looks, below it is.

We spent only a few dollars on the book cover. But with the additional reading and knowledge, I gained over time. I suggest you go for a cover from professional designers and it will cost you 6000 to 10,000 Rs [$100 or more], but it will make it look that much better.

Even for this book, I spent around 1400 Rs [Around 20 dollars] for the cover and to be frank I am not happy with it. If I had some cash to invest then I would have surely gone for a cover in the range of 100 dollars.

EDITING - MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL, DID YOU SAY NO, OMG

Ignorance is the worst enemy to anyone in any field.

I am not telling you to accumulate knowledge in all fields and walks of life. Instead what I am saying is that you should try to gain as much knowledge as possible in your primary field.

Let’s jump into the practical part.

The first draft version of the beauty book was ready.

My sister handed it over to me and told me to check it out.

What do men know about skincare, skincare products or beauty advice?

Instead, what I checked in the book was the flow of content and what topics were covered and how long the book was.

The first thing I noticed was that the content page looked so damn boring. I mean there are many ways to say the same thing, but some ways will make you hear it until it’s over and there are other ways which will make you yawn every few seconds. What I read was a yawn-filled contents page.

The second thing was to find out how good the content was. I was not the right person to do this, and promptly I passed on this suggestion to my sister.

I told her to show the book and to collect reviews from her friends, girls whom she knows, or friend’s friends, cousins and sisters, aunts etc.

You see, reviews are very important. Don’t just rely on yourself to judge the book or its content.

Ask as many as you can. It’s better to ask those whom you think are in your potential audience.

After a lot of work, the content page started falling into place.

There were certain areas in the book which looked filled up for the sake of filling pages. Those were eliminated.

Finally there we had a book which was 27 pages long in a word document.

I was like “shit, what is this which I have?”

A mere 27 pages. My first thought was what do we do with 27 pages, where do we sell, how do we market?

We went to shoot a feature film and ended up with a something the size of the trailer, that too with the hard task of handing it over to the editor to edit. [After editing what will be left is few fast-moving still images].

Every cell in my body (including those half dead cells) were all disappointed.

When you have started something and have come this far, you have to do something right.

So I had to pull in all my strength and took on the task of reconsidering what’s missing in the book, and how to add value to it. I kept reading, going further I will say what was done to bulk up the book in a meaningful way.

Meanwhile, my sister with all the reviews she had, told me that she will get into the task of correcting the book.

After a few days she came back to me with what I thought was corrected copy, instead, she had actually rewritten the whole book and she was happy with the way it turned out.

It might sound little crazy to you and me, but it was brave of her to rewrite the whole book.

Pages-wise it was the same, but there were more changes in the way information was presented based on the feedback received.

At this point in time, we were fortunate to have read about things to consider while self-publishing. We were trying to consume as much information as possible on self-publishing from all sources.

One thing stuck in my mind, in one of the books it was clearly mentioned not to skip the editing part- the topic of this chapter.

Me and my sister decided to do as much editing as we could do before passing it on to professional editors.

After a full 3 days of going through the book painfully line by line, we managed to finish off the so-called editing from our end.

Actually, for us, it looked complete. There were still doubts in our mind like “why is an editor required?”. The manuscript is good, why waste time looking out for them?

With that half-minded effort, I searched for an editorial team and handed over the job to them.

They had promised to deliver the edited book in 2 days.

Me and my sister were expecting hardly few changes to be carried out from their end and we even were expecting to get praised for the book [I mean as I said it was edited by us line by line, so we were expecting to have less to no errors].

The first electric shock. Somebody from the editor team on the 2nd day came back to me saying the editing is done, and they were looking one last time before handing it over to us.

He told us to give some more time and he said we have corrected the book and the total corrections count is 637.

I was saying to myself, what happened? Is he kidding?

I was angry, curious, irritated and also wondering.

I waited for the book, I mean I wanted to see what on earth was changed to reach a count of 637.

Later in the day, finally, my edited book was in my downloads folder.

I went through it not once but twice, and finally ended up with the realization: I realized how stupid I was and how damn important editing is.

If this book was handed to you without the editing, you would have taken the printout and would have thrown the book right into my face like a baseball pitcher.

If you have to take only 1 thing out of this book. Just take this editing part with you. It’s most important thing for which you can never press the escape key on your keyboard.

So make a note in your mind, don’t skip “editing” for god’s sake, unless you want to test your audience’s grammar skills!

BULK UP - FEED THOSE FISHES 10 TIMES A DAY, UNTIL IT GROWS BIGGER THAN THAT SHARK I SAW LAST NIGHT ON TV

Okay, as I said before, all I had in my hands was a 27 page long [short] book with me.

You might say “don’t you dare call it a book again”. I know that is true to some extent.

So to feed the fish to grow big, I came up with these ideas.

A) Adding Images or Icons – Yes, Icons served two purposes in our book. One, putting them in added more readability [you will understand when you read icons chapter], two, it created the necessary line gap required.

B) Adding a nice image wherever there was a gap in the text of the book.

In our book, there were many times we were only able to fill ¼ or ½ page. What we did was, we added a nice flower in that page gap to fill it up.

The flower added much-needed “oomph” factor and also served the purpose of filling up the empty space

C) Introduction page, about page, Thank you page, Conclusion page, the end page, Bibliography, Who the book is for, further reference etc. These will also help [Ethical things]

Although the above methods [Except for D] are not an ethical way of stretching your book, when you are really concerned about page counts then I say you have to feed the fish!

If you say “what nonsense?” Not to worry, there are 3 choices available to you:

1. Drop the book project.

2. Take more feedback and if it feels that whatever that is there to be said is already said in those 27 pages, then to go ahead and launch it.

3. Wait until new topics arise and more information is collected over the months until you reach your satisfactory page count.

The reason for stressing so much about page count is because from schooling days to college days most of them are used to seeing, reading, carrying textbooks and subconsciously when someone says books subconsciously we get a picture of something which is big and thick and not something which is thin and looks like brochures.

Let me share my own recent book buying experience.

From 1 year I am pretty much deeply into blogging. I had bought 18 domains and I was trying to blog hard. At one point in time, I reached a stage where I wanted to get rid of most of my blogs because of my inability to handle so many.

In that quest, I did come across a book which told how and where to sell blogs a complete guide. The author had one awesome landing page and had good credentials as he had sold few blogs for six figures [Dollars].

I was convinced and it was priced around $47 and there was some discount thrown on it and making it cheaper around 20 dollars. I was ready to buy, only thing was I wanted to know the book size, I mean the number of pages. What I did is promptly I mailed them asking for the number of pages. Next day came the reply from the sales team saying 84 pages.

I was taken back, I mean I was not ready to shell out 20 dollars for 84-page book. Few more mails were exchanged and finally, I bought it.

This made me realize how important page count is when it comes to books.

As far our beauty book, I wasn’t convinced at all even after bulking it up with About, Copyright and other pages as it never came to the size of so-called books.

I wanted something more to compensate for the lack of pages.

My so-called creative brain started working. I came up with 3 things.

1] One to give away another book along with the main book.

After a lot of thinking, we decided to give away “50 beauty tips” book along with the main book.

The task of writing 50 tips was gracefully transferred into my sister’s hand.

2] Second thing was to give something as a gift

That something as a gift took 2 weeks of our time. I mean what gift to give, where to find it, do the gift provider has enough stock. How to send it across to buyers, courier charges etc.

After a lot of searching, we did find a gift. A nice jewelry box. It looked awesome. The plan was to put some colorful beads and 50 tips book into that box.

To make the 50 tips book fit into it, we needed to make the 50 tips book as a mini or micro book.

It’s like running after one rabbit and once you feel that you cannot catch it, then running after another rabbit. That way we kept running behind something or the other.

The gift shop guy who had the box told us that he is importing it from Italy and one time he gets 500 pieces only and each order takes 1 month to deliver.

For small book we went asking printing press after printing press, no one was ready to take up the order.

To cut short the story. We decided to give up the whole concept of giving gift box and retained the thought of giving 50 tips book as a normal Ebook in PDF format.

So we ended up having another burden of getting 50 tips book edited, formatted, designed, naming the book, getting a cover designed etc.

3] Coming to the third and last thing, what we did is we added a recipe at the end of the book [homemade recipe for getting glowing skin]

I mean my sister was bragging about this recipe saying it is that good, homemade, very secretive, got from my Aunt many years ago. She was not ok to put it in the book, she was like if I give away this recipe I will not be left with anything else. I mean she had plans of making It a skin product from it [Yes we 2 little people were dreaming big and there was no limit to it and my sincere suggestion is to keep fewer dreams with the first book, as less as possible].

I wanted the book to gain value. I convinced her and finally, the recipe was added to the book in the form of Infographics.

FORMATTING - MAKE ME LOOK PRETTY AND PRETTIER

Okay, what is formatting with respect to an Ebook?

Is it just proper alignment or making it an art piece?

By this time we were totally exhausted. This was the last thing which was left.

We had very bad experiences with this part.

One, this was the last thing which was left and two, it might be hard to believe but it took more than 30 days of our time to get just 2 books formatted and the total pages of both the books put together are 90 pages. [Second book was just collection of 50 tips which we had planned to give it away for free to attract buyers].

Wondering how we reached 60 pages for the first book? As I admitted, there was a lot of page-filling, icons, infographics, and margins that took it to that magical number.

So you might ask what happened.

We couldn’t figure out what had to be done.

A complete lack of knowledge got us into time troubles. I mean this is how it went.

First, we were not sure what was used to format the book. I mean, is it Microsoft word which is used and finally exported to pdf, or is there any other software used?

I relied on Google to figure out more about formatting, and landed on the term “Adobe InDesign”.

A huge temporary relief was percolating all over my body. I was like I found the solution, I had a kind of proud feeling which didn’t ultimately last long.

So I thought the day was saved. Find some freelancer who can do formatting using InDesign and call it a day.

Okay, we needed something to say to him. I mean “design it like this and that” etc.

That led us to back to the bookstore to find some good books which we could use as a reference.

That’s where all the trouble began. If you are thinking of the format used in most of the novels, I feel that’s easy; just simple text after text and some nice font stuffed inside a book.

However, there were 2 things for us. One, it was an eBook and two, it was beauty-related so making it look beautiful was a must.

So, as usual, we started checking beauty books and found one heck of a good-looking book not in the beauty category but in the recipe category.

It was gorgeous inside and out. We felt that is what we need to do to have a great book in our hands and in the hands of others.

One small tip: how do you know what you found is a good book? Go visit the same store for some number of days to see the change in the number of copies.

We didn’t do it purposefully, but accidentally we went back to the bookstore to check something else and out of curiosity when we went to the place this book was kept, we found out it no longer existed there. Gone forever. It was an international edition and only one copy was in for display, and that one little beauty left the store too.

The things we learnt at the end were as follows:

A) Most of the design centers which you find near to your house are there to design single pages be it a poster or banner or greeting cards or anything for that matter and for them 60 or 90 page is like 30 to 60 different customers. They will out rightly say no when you say out loud the number of pages you want to get designed.

B) No, you will not find people who use WORD to format your doc.

C) However much you love Adobe InDesign, still people are using CorelDraw. One reason I heard from them is that it is cheaper and has been there for a long time. [Haven’t checked for facts and figures].

D) Don’t ever try to learn design and deliver in a few days or weeks. I tried learning InDesign after a lot of “no's” we got from design centers, and don’t ask me the pain I went through trying to do the designs myself. The mental exhaustion was more than what I imagined it to be.

E) Yes, extra money, time, and energy spent on formatting does matter a lot.

Check out this, this is how the book looks after formatting.

Isn’t it pretty? Like the girl who comes once in a while in a dream to tease you to say it’s time to get more sleep just to be her side.

A) Plan each step, if you find a good designer, keep them!

Or do the next best thing. Treat your book as a collection of a set of pages; tackle a few pages at a time.

That is what worked for us. Fortunately, we had handed over the complete design work to an online designer. We had told him to have 3-page templates and the rest of the books would have the same templates with the content being different.

Luckily he designed the template pages and later came back saying it will take too much time to align format all the pages.

With those templates, we went again searching for design centers who could put our word data in a neat format in those template pages.

Finally, we found one lady from a good design center and saved the hassle. We were happy with the output we got.

After the work that lady told how we were lucky, as even that design center never takes that kind of work. It was only because that particular designer had no work ongoing that her boss took up the job and assigned it to her.

B) Size does matter. If you are really sure you are not going to get it printed, then fix it to a size which you like. We stuck to a standard A4 Page size.

Do you have plans of getting it printed? Then you will have to reconsider the page size. A5 would be ideal if you ask me. Smaller and better in people’s hands too.

Also, keep this in mind, you can’t just use the same formatting used for A4, reformatting needs to be done.

C) I would suggest you get it done offline. Online formatting is fine, but if you want any changes then it is very difficult to convey and get all the changes done properly. It will be possible but it would consume weeks of your time while in-person it can be accomplished in a few hours. That is what we did, we sat with that lady and told her all the changes and got the job done.

INFORGRPAHICS - ALTHOUGH IT WAS LONG, I LIKE YOUR PRESENTATION, BUT FOR GOD SAKE CAN YOU PLEASE SUMMARIZE IT IN FEW LINES

I am not sure when this Infographics thing started.

But whatever good which comes into market, I say just implement it!

I never knew what Infographics was until I got into blogging.

The story goes like this: me, an ambitious guy, read online about blogging and got really excited that people make so much money from it so easily.

I started reading a lot of stories, got inspired, kept the reading going for few more months and made a bold decision to make a living from blogging.

I started blogs and thought I was on right track to becoming independent and earning more than what I used to earn through my day job.

Days passed, weeks passed and nothing happened. That is when I realized that something is not working out; there was hardly any traffic to my blog!

That is when I went online to google how to get traffic to my blog. There came a big list of tips/suggestions. All of which I never knew.

These days because of the internet there is no need to invent the wheel, be good at searching hard, and be smart. You will find someone who has already faced the problem you have in hand and has a story to save you already!

While reading about traffic there were suggestions about what a typical post should have on your blog [I mean the articles you see on websites]. The suggestion was to have images, infographics, lengthy text, etc.

Then the word “infographics” caught my attention. When I started looking up more about it, I felt that it was something good. I had seen it a couple of times but never noticed it.

This word “noticed it” is a bit scary. Let me share a story which most of the guys who have a girlfriend can relate to.

Enjoy my suffering!

If you have a girlfriend you will have been asked a minimum of a couple of times something like “did you notice some change in me?” You will be like “oh my god here comes the Exam paper without any notice and you can’t fail in it nor can you scrape by with passing marks”. Brother, a distinction is what you need in order to go home safely.

When my girlfriend asked this question, I took a hell of a lot of time to find out what change was there, I mean thank god I found out before she could turn violent! She had got some gap filling done to her teeth, of course I was able to find out only after she gave the clue that it is in her face and only when she started murmuring “see you don’t even observe me and I doubt that you are still loving me” that is when I said all my prayers and guessed it correctly.

Coming back to Infographics, these are cool things or ways to express a lot of text.

It’s like saying everything through a single image in a beautiful eye-pleasing way.

Example

A) Showing you the steps to use your credit card

B) Showing you how the earth evolved

C) Showing you flirting tips

D) Explaining complex tax calculations

Just type infographics in google images and see for yourself.

Here are some samples of Infographics

This was used in the beauty book

The same Infographic designed by other designer

Another sample infographic used for my blog

So now you have an idea what an Infographic is.

I wanted to use them in the book to give that “wow factor”.

So what topic should you use infographics for? Hmm, the first hard task was explaining to my cousin-sister what they are and how they add value.

Finally, after a lot of explaining, I handed over the task of coming up with topics for which they were needed.

She shortlisted 15 topics and we finalized 4 topics and ended up having 4 beautiful infographics in our book.

Throw in one or two in your book; it does add some overall niceness to your book.

ICONS - THOSE LITTLE INKY PINKY THINGS WHICH ALWAYS LOOK CUTE

We were feeling that the book was all about text. I mean text here, text there. The problem with our book was it was not just text-filled in the form of paragraphs which you and I are used to.

It was simple, one-liners which people use in bars and all sorts of places.

Let me explain it with an example

70 percent of our book was filled with simple lines like this

“Use this as a toner”

“Use this as a face pack”

“This is good for those with oily skin”

Points, points, points, yes it was just bullet points.

I felt it would be too boring and would not be pleasing for readers to read.

That is when the idea of having small icons came to me.

What we did, rather simply, was wherever some ingredients were explained, an icon was placed there.

This way, some 90 icons were used all over the place in all different sizes.

Those little icons made the pdf look more beautiful and pleasing to the eye.

COPYRIGHT - AN INDIRECT WAY OF SAYING THAT NOT TO FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS AND A DIRECT WAY OF SAYING NOT TO COPY THE INFORMATION

What if your 6th sense says that somebody is going to steal your laptop before you reach home? You keep watch on your laptop, you will hold it tight, you will keep it close to you and you will have your 2 eyes on it forever.

But how do you safeguard your book which will be out in the open?

I mean nowadays it’s so easy to buy a book and publish it somewhere on the internet with an anonymous account.

I mean it’s like hide and seek. It’s literally not possible to safeguard your book unless there is a great way to track all users who bought the book.

But still, we add a page to scare a few. It’s like putting a board up saying “beware of the dogs”. A team of thieves, if they have decided to rob your house for whatever reason, will also factor your dogs into their plan, and they will find a way to distract them so that they execute their plans as you are awe stuck with shit all over your pants.

Let’s jump back to the copyright page part. Don’t worry too much, just take a template and use it. This is where we spent much less time. We told a copywriter to write it for us and we just copied and pasted it.

Or you can google a template, change a word here and there, and then you can call it all yours.

COPYWRITING - THE MOST SECRET, HIGHEST QUALITY INFORMATION WHICH YOU WILL EVER READ IN LIFE. WANT MORE SALES-EY WRITING ? THEN READ ON

Yes, you are all set to take out those golden eggs which were hidden from the eyes of everyone on this earth.

You know their worth and you know the hard work it took to make them what they are.

However, how do you say that to the world?

This is where you catch hold of those who know how to present it to the world in such a way that whoever reads it takes every opportunity to buy it.

So if you ask me how I know about copywriting.

The story goes like this.

Around 10 to 12 years ago I had attended a class on some alpha mind training, I don’t remember much, but during the introduction (which was necessary for everyone to do) I had heard a guy who was sitting in the front seat saying he was a copywriter.

I was like what did he say, did he mumble, rumble or is there something like that existing on this earth?

You can call me ignorant or many years behind this era, but the fact remains that there and then is when I realized that there is some career by that name and people were making money out of it.

Now a year ago when I dug into it, I realized that there are great copywriters who have helped their customers make unbelievable sales because of their copy.

To cut it short, if you are new to copywriting, find a good copywriter and tell them to write sales copy for your book. It does matter, if you say no and if you have other plans, please don’t proceed, we can’t just go to publish in Amazon or in social media with our words or story saying buy this book, I have worked hard blah blah blah. Ultimately, that won’t create an impression.

We need professional help to tell the same story. Trust me when I say that we do need it. They do that day in day out and we should simply trust what they write. Period.

Things I realized in the whole journey of working on the book can be summarized in the following:

A) Find the best for the task so that you don’t end up doing the same thing again and again. Save your time and money.

B) Don’t even think of skipping something which is proved and stressed by other experts in your field.

C) Have a concrete plan. That is what will save time and money.

FIVERR - ONE STOP WEBSITE FOR ALL [MOST OF] YOUR NEEDS

Till now I covered whatever I knew about books.

I mean I even gave this big checklist.

A) Choosing the book to write

B) Naming the book

C) A nice cover design

D) Writing an attractive content page

E) First draft

F) Reading, re-reading, editing

G) Professional editing

H) Formatting of the book

I) Icons / Infographics / Sketches/ Images

J) Examples, stories, proof, data, case studies, quotes

K) Finding the audience

L) A place to put your book so that they can download it

M) Pricing

N) Copywriting

O) Advertising and Marketing

I also mentioned that a few from the list can be skipped.

Just compare the points with this book, you will realize that I have skipped few from the list of Icons, Formatting etc.

Still, you will have a big checklist of the task in front of you.

By now if you have decided to write a book, hopefully, you will be saying something like this “Author has mentioned about different things, but never he has mentioned where he got the things done and what process he followed to write book”.

Just to make it damn easy. I am listing out the exact steps followed to write this book. I feel that would help you understand book writing process from the perspective of an Amateur author like me. You can use this as broad guidance, I mean you will roughly know what needs to be done. To dig deeper into this subject only advice I can give is [Read books, follow blogs, watch YouTube on this subject]

STEP 1: PREPARATION AND TOPICS

New word document. Georgia font with font size 12. Other fonts which can you try are Baskerville and Palatino.

As I knew what this book would be all about. I started by recalling all the things which were carried out for the Beauty book project. I was able to list out few things.

I spent few hours digging deep into whatever was done. Finally, I had a big checklist in front of me. I mean I had to shortlist the final things which would be part of the book.

At the end of it, I just had one or two-word list in front of me like Editing, Copywriting, Book name, cover design etc.

Then I wore the copywriting cap, I mean saying something in a funnier tone, at least saying something that makes you think for a second more.

1. Ex: Bulk Up – Feed these fishes 10 times a day, until it grows bigger than that shark I saw last night on TV.

This if you read you will either feel that Author is mad or about to get mad. But Still, I added it trying to create a sense out of nonsense. I mean just for the fun of it. Otherwise, books can get boring before you are snoring, it’s not rhyming, and it’s just my timing and if you are still reading then you are something.

Fortunately or unfortunately I do nothing to come up with this kind of one-liner or two liners, it just pops out and I added these one-liners to most of the chapter headings.

Step 1 was complete. I had a list of topic and one-liners added to that.

STEP 2: ACTUAL WRITING

Usually, I don’t think much about writing style. I start off scribbling out things on each topic. I don’t even follow the sequential order. I mean for example while I was writing about editing, I was just mentioning about how much editing matters, suddenly I realized it would be better if I can add a real example, that required me to log in to another website, search for the editing document, copy and paste it. That much of work would exhaust me, so usually all those kind of boring work I skip off and I just continue writing other topics.

Trust me the first day I had typed around 30 pages. Most of the topics were covered briefly.

Next day I continued writing the rest of the topics, this went on for few days, wherever I felt some image or picture needs to be inserted gap was left and writing continued.

After few days so-called draft version was ready. I mean most of the writing part was complete. Next couple of days I added the necessary images, read the book from start to finish, made some changes here and there.

In one week I was having the book with everything written. My part was over. Next job was to outsource every other bit of work.

STEP 3: OUTSOURCING

The thing is these days all you need to publish a book is some money that too max 100 dollars. Rest all can be outsourced. I mean don’t have an idea on what topic to write, just outsource it to someone to shortlist few niches. Once the niche is decided, outsource it to a writer to write a book, give them brief guidelines on what topic, how many words and your budget. That way all that steps even including publishing the book to Amazon can be outsourced. If you have a lot of cash you can do this way and have 10 or 20 books ready in a month’s time and publish it.

I usually use a website called Fiverr for outsourcing most of the tasks. It’s one wonderful website to get most of our work done for 5 dollars. Whatever your need you will find a gig there (service there).

The services which I was in need of were

1] Editing

2] Cover Design

3] Formatting

The book which you are reading now went through all the above 3 mentioned steps.

This is all I did to become an Author.

How does it feel, does it not sound easy to publish a book after reading this. Now it’s your turn, Gear up, wear your Author hat and start writing.

PLATFORM TO SELL - HELLO MR. I SAW YOUR GOLDEN EGGS, WHERE CAN I BUY THEM

Thanks to Google, I was able to set this up in 3 days’ time.

My previous experience of blogging and forethought of having bought a domain name for the book helped ease this process.

If you are totally new then perhaps consider a manual way of selling. Ask your customers to make a payment to your PayPal account and personally email them the book. That works as long as you are expecting only a few sales a day.

If you want to have what you call an automated system for buying, then the more knowledge you have about website or blog creation, the easier it will be.

If you are an experienced blogger or web developer then whatever I am listing out below feels basic, for others it might look daunting but this also can be outsourced if necessary.

A) A domain name is a must. Don’t try to buy a domain after all book work is done. Buy it well in advance, I mean at least when the book name is finalized.

A domain name is nothing but the name of your website. Like Facebook.com, Google.com etc.

You can buy domains from godaddy.com amongst other registrars.

B) The hosting provider is mandatory; all my blogs are hosted using Bluehost. If you ask me, that is what I wholeheartedly recommended. Also, Bluehost provides a free domain name with their plan and this helps you to skip the first step.

C) I recommend you to go with WordPress to set up everything. It’s very easy and you can have your website up in mere hours.

D) Next comes themes. Professional-looking themes give the added richness to your website. I had bought the theme X and I used the same for setting up a blog for selling the book.

E) There are many platforms which you can use to sell digital or physical products.

We stuck to PayuMoney and for that to work with your blog you need to install the plugin of PayuMoney and also install the Woocommerce plugin. Some basic setup is required for product adding, setting up prices and other things, however, you can ask for support from the technical team of PayuMoney if you get stuck.

If you ask why did we publish the book on our own website. The reasons are as below

1] We wanted to give away a free book.

2] We wanted to have freedom over price, I mean like giving discounts, changing the price, giving away sample chapters etc.

3] We wanted to have full profit without any commissions.

4] We felt it will be much easier to advertise.

If you are not aiming for the all the above-mentioned things, then the best option you have is to go with Amazon.com

I am talking about Amazon Kindle publishing.

It’s much easier than what I previously illustrated.

Steps are

1. Create an Amazon account

2. Get your book formatted in the Kindle format

3. Upload the book, add the description

4. Upload the cover

5. Publish and it will be live in 1 or 2 days

There is a number of YouTube videos which show the above steps with more detailed information.

EXPENSES - DO I REALLY NEED TO SPEND THIS MUCH FOR THIS LITTLE BOOK

I am very bad at bookkeeping. I didn’t really keep track of all the expenses, but I do know roughly how much was spent.

I had borrowed 1 lakh rupees [1500 dollars approx.]. Around 15 to 20 thousand Rs was spent on my personal expenses, and I still have a few hundred Rs left in my account. So with that formula, I can say around 80,000 Rs was spent on the book.

The list of things on which money was spent on is given below. You can see some double entries, this means that money was spent twice on the same task as it was not delivered according to our expectation.

1. Book formatting – 50 tips book [Was not satisfied]

2. Book formatting – 50 tips book [Gave to another freelancer]

3. Book formatting – 50 tips book [More changes lead to more billing]

4. Cover design for 2 books

5. Cover design for 2 books [from another freelancer]

6. Cover design changes

7. Editing – 2 books combined

8. Icons total 90 numbers

9. Infographics 4 [2 different freelancers]

10. Introduction writing

11. Copywriting

12. Editing

13. Physical books

14. Website

15. Advertising

ADVERTISING AND MARKETING - I HAVE LITTLE GOLDEN EGGS WHICH I WANT TO SELL, COULD YOU PLEASE HELP PEOPLE BUY THEM

Okay, you all know what advertising is, because every other street and every tv channel will have shown you enough, and don’t tell me that you’re never judging them, reacting to them with “wow!” and making those sick faces to see that such an ad was made.

Okay, if you ask an amateur like me on advertising, I will have to give that dumb guy look.

So you think I will pass on this topic, no no wait. I have a little thing to share with you.

Again, from my experience. The first thought which came to my mind was to advertise the book in blogs. Why? That is where I saw people were making good money by using the existing user base. I mean usually, people start reading a blog, subscribe to their email list and once they subscribe they start getting emails from the blog owner on anything new which gets posted. They start visiting the blog to read more about the post.

This cycle goes on. Over the months, they become loyal to the blog and will start commenting, interacting, and become an indirect part of that blog.

Each blog in a different category will have an audience who are there because they like that blog or niche the blog is in.

They are those who need to be targeted.

What we did, we started listing out top 20 blogs in the beauty niche.

I was happy with 20, my sister went all the way to list out 75 blogs and what was done next? We emailed them. All who had the text “advertise” on their blog, we emailed.

We told them our story, we informed them that a book is coming out and would like to advertise.

How many replies? A good 25 replies. Is it not a good thing for you to take it along with you?

I mean if you are still not convinced. One of the blogs had 7 million monthly visitors and 7 million Facebook followers and all are there in one blog because they are interested in the things shared by the blog. 98% of their audience were girls.

What prayer to god would lead you to such a well-targeted audience?

I mean it’s like putting your hands in the thin air and pulling out a bag full of chocolates when you are craving sugar. I mean at that time even a tiny chocolate would have been okay, you would be happy with any chocolate for that matter, even if it was a milk-based chocolate which you hated; all you needed was something to satisfy your sugar addiction, but what you got instead was a bag full of rich big chocolates with enough choice for you to fill your stomach happily.

That is what happened to us. We would have been happy if we had found blogs with a few thousand followers, but instead, we got such a big blog with followers and with the right audience which we were craving for [looking for].

This is how we went about advertising and marketing our book.

As the book was ready, and there were a lot of burning arguments with respect to price, and finally the book was priced at 190 Rs [3 dollars]. That is the 2 books combined for the Ebook version.

2 books, a total of 90 pages at 190 Rs. The price felt right because the book had such a nice format.

Frankly, I was dreaming of having my own business. Yes it’s true that I was expecting some very good sales too, in the tens of thousands.

We had already planned the way to take it out the market.

As a preliminary thing I mentioned earlier, an email was sent to all bloggers asking for the cost of advertising.

Finally, we shortlisted one blogger to start off with advertising.

The cost was 1500 Rs and her blog was having 5000+ monthly visitors and 4000+ Facebook fans.

I don’t know where I read it, but marketing conversion usually is at 1%. [Take a shotgun, aim right at brain, and keep firing until the old worthless information in the head dies]

My analytical mind started saying

A) 1% is enough

B) You are targeting the right audience. A Beauty blog & Blog owner will be writing a sponsored post and she has 4000+ followers, what else?

C) You are simply superb [yes it did compliment me!]

My cousin-sister and I were excited and we sent the blog owner our PDF copy of the 2 books and told her to publish it on her blog.

4000 people * 1 percent = 40 sales * 190 rupees = 7600 Rs

With 1500 Rs investment what more you can ask for.

Think ahead of time they say! We were already calculating how to reinvest that 7600 Rs into 2 other blogs.

We were getting ourselves prepared to advertise the book in the biggest beauty blog which had some 8 million [80 lakhs] monthly readers.

Ohhh please don’t calculate it with the 1% formula, it hurts.

How close have you seen thunder strike? I saw it. I mean not closely, it felt as if it had struck me.

After one week of advertising on the first blog we got only one sale. We were shocked and on the verge of collapsing.

B+ or be positive, we started thinking positively, that’s common nobody will be ready to accept that they have failed. We were like “yes too many holidays have come, most of them will be out of town and we can expect sales to happen soon. Let’s wait and hold on.”

Even after waiting for 10 days the result was the same. That is when we realized that the little boat which we were using to cross the mighty sea has a hole in it, and the hole is big enough for us to put both hands in to catch a fish.

The boat was sinking, and so were my dreams of having a business. I was getting more depressed at the thought of going back to my old job.

At the time of writing this line, my resume is flying all around in Naukri [Job portal] and my dreams are shattered and lying on the ground in pieces.

2 is better than 1. If I was alone doing everything, like how I am wearing different hats for this book, then I would have run faster than anything you have ever seen before.

Thankfully I was not alone. My cousin-sister was there through it all.

We came up with this little plan. That was to sell enough copies to get enough money to advertise on the biggest blog.

That required us to sell 80 copies. Yes, advertising on that big blog cost that much [15,000 Rs was the advertising cost].

80 copies only, right? Sounds easy enough?

We started off with WhatsApp marketing. Sent it to many people.

I mean, so many things go viral on WhatsApp right? Circulating like an epidemic.

We were expecting the same, we sent it to every person we knew telling them to forward it hoping to make it viral.

Unfortunately there were no sales, even more unfortunately, I don’t know how many people it even reached.

Facebook advertising

We kept trying. Next on the list was Facebook.

With no money left in hand, we took the free route, Yes we did the stupidest thing that is publishing in groups hoping to bring in sales.

Groups are not meant to advertise things is what I realized after reading it.

However, many groups had 50,000 plus people in them and that 1% formula always kicked in saying “do it, 80 is not a big number” also we were not losing anything, so we tried it.

Resulted in a big zero, so big that if I stand behind it you can’t even see me.

SMS

Next in the line was SMS [If you remember some years ago

Phones had an SMS tone which used to say in a lady's voice “You

Got an SMS”]

Yes, we did send a lot of SMSs to known and unknown numbers.

No response.

I even used the bulk SMS option and sent it to 100+ people.

Email Marketing:

Then at that time, I had read somewhere that email marketing is like a gold mine.

Conversion is very high and in double digits. I was excited; if I Could get an email list of a targeted audience then I could send some very compelling emails and then that is it!

Bulk email marketing that is where our inquiry and direction led to. I realized one thing, and that is that Email marketing is expensive and my whole formula of conversion was completely incorrect.

The simplest thing one needs to understand is this.

If you take email marketing as an example. There are 4 stages.

1. Send email to targeted group

2. Email open rate

3. Email click-through rate

4. Buyers

Let’s now go by the numbers. Assuming luckily when I got up I found a list of 5 lakh [500,000] email addresses of a potential audience of my book in an excel sheet sent by Angel.

So if I say 5 lakh * 0.3 conversion rate [500,000 * 0.3] = 1500 sales, then just slap me before I utter the next word.

The equation goes like this

STEP 1: Sending an email to the targeted group. Yes assume I sent. So 5 lakh [500,000] emails delivered right to their inbox.

STEP 2: Email open rate. Just ask yourself how many emails you open and see and how many you delete without reading.

I am a lucky person you know, so I am taking 10% as the Email open rate. So now out of 5 lakh [500,000] people, 50,000 people have opened to see the email.

STEP 3: Email click-through rate.

Yes, now they are reading stories or sales copy of the book. They are seeing the pictures of the book. Let’s assume they read the whole story and finally they find a link where they can buy the book.

How many would click to check out the book?

Again let’s take a bigger percentage. Let’s take 10% so that means that out of 50,000, 5000 people decided to see for themselves what it is that book is all about.

STEP 4: Conversion

Now those 5000 are welcomed by a nice website, with even more information about the book. Now what? Don’t say that you’ve always bought from all the websites you visited by clicking some link.

Some you clicked out of curiosity and some accidentally and some purposefully, whatever the reason, still I ask you to say how likely are you going to buy something which you see for the first time. You would say “very rarely” right?

My luck just flew away, did you see?

Now the magic number of 1 percent conversion, I don’t want to take 0.3 percent, I am a positive guy you see, and 1 percent is that which is floating around my screen.

5000 * 1 percent = 500 sales.

Yes, that’s good number only if I had got that 5 lakh [500,000] emails from some heavenly angel and somebody wrote some awesome highly-converting email sales copy for free with a cherry on the top. Or perhaps if I found some free cloud-based bulk email service which sends 5 lakh [500,000] emails, free of cost, just for me.

But in reality none of the above happens unless you are ready to spend 1 or 2 lakh [200,000] rupees.

People liked the book covers, they liked the website. The congratulations and appreciation were pouring all over. Just not any money.

In personal one-on-one Facebook marketing, we realized that lot of them preferred hard copies. Is it some hard truth we missed? I don’t know.

Pinterest marketing was also tried. Didn’t work out.

So we had one last option to try that was to go for hard copies.

Crowdfunding.

We obviously didn’t have any money left for getting hard copies out, which required another 30 to 40k Rs.

So we decided to go for crowdfunding.

I already had experienced failure in crowdfunding and was not willing to try it out, but I nonetheless created a crowdfunding campaign and this was the only time I was 200% sure it would fail. My prediction turned true.

Not even a single paisa was funded [I had put it on the Indiegogo platform].

After all the effort and after follow-up on Facebook, WhatsApp with friends there was still no sales and we ran out of energy to take free marketing any further.

SAD PART - DON'T CRY THAT HARD, YOU ARE NOT ALONE

Funnily I used the same Google search in a different way for the same project.

All these days I was using it like “How to sell 1 lakh [100,000] Copies of a book.”

Ebook marketing tips.

Highest sold books.

Etc.

Now I was searching

Stories of those who failed at Ebook publishing

The struggle of Authors to sell books

Etc.

I came across one wonderful blog and after reading it I realized that the hard part of selling books that too hard copies.

With that hard truth hitting from all directions, I felt it was much riskier to go for the hard copy version.

This way after all word of mouth / paid / free advertising marketing; we were able to sell 3 copies of the book.

It’s such a sinking feeling while I write this.

CONCLUSION - I SWEAR THOSE 4 MONTHS WERE THE MOST PAINFUL THING WHICH HAPPENED TO ME APART FROM THOSE PIMPLES WHICH FORMED ON MY A**

Can you imagine the feeling of sitting accidentally on a big pile of thorns razor sharp and specially made for you?

I didn’t imagine I would experience it.

This is my journey in the world of Books.

I wish I could write more, more is good or less is good I don’t know. Hopefully one day I am able to launch a book big enough for you to carry and thick enough to replace your pillow. It will be good enough that you can sleep with it!

This is it. Yes, this is it, you have come to the end.

I hope you like it and yes I have to sail all alone in my boat.

Here I go, goodbye from your first-time Author who is wishing you the very best for your first book.

Yet again I am on this little boat to cross the sea to fulfill my dream.

Keep dreaming and the world will look more beautiful with the dreams.

THANK YOU