Episode 9 Building your Digital Empire with Amazon – A Self Publishing Discussion

I apologize for that. My computer decided to crash and reboot. I'm actually having to use one of my older systems because my newer system that I. Just bought a year ago decided to die on me.

This is actually the first time that I've not been able to fix a computer by myself. So I've got to take it to the shop. And I have yet to do that. I'm still trying to do it myself.

But anyway.... I thought for a second I was going to have to do this from my phone, which thank God that the Spreaker app allows you to do that. So that's another good thing about Spreaker.com. You can do it all from your phone if you wanted to.

So anyway, here we go. Hello everyone. Today is Monday, May the 20th. I hope everyone had a marvelous weekend, a great weekend.

It was beautiful and sunny here. No rain. It wasn't too hot. It wasn't too cold.

I hope you experienced the same kind of weather that. I did here. Today's actually my great-grandmother's birthday. She would have been a hundred and some years old now, but her birthday was May the 20th.

Anyway, this is your host, Mr. John Higginbotham, and we're going to get started here in just a second. Today's topic for episode... 9.

Building your digital empire with Amazon. A self-publishing discussion. We're going to discuss how to self-publish and all the ins and outs of self-publishing on Amazon. But before I do that, I'm going to get ready for some news, all news that is news in e-commerce, and do some questions and answers before we.

Start the program. So I will be with you in just a moment. You are listening to the Digipire podcast for May the 20th, 2019. You can follow along with the outline at digipire.com slash episode nine.

Okay, first I want to catch up on some news from Friday. This past Friday on the 17th. I did not get to get through everything. Because like I've said before, I'm only alive in 45 minutes.

And I've found it very challenging to get everything in during that time frame. I think I have a tendency to be a little bit verbose. But anyway. Here's some news from Friday, and then I'll go.

On with today's news. Just a second. Okay, according to Payments.com, e-commerce sizzle boosts brick-and-mortar comp sales, and this was posted on May 17, 2019. It says Walmart digital sales increase.

Visa says contactless checkout is on the rise and Buffett's Brookshire. Invest in Amazon. Fizzles include soft bank shares sliding, retail sales fluctuating in the Supreme Court, green lighting the lawsuit against Apple, which I didn't know that. I'll have to look at that more into that.

Call it the e-commerce wind beneath brick-and-mortar wings. For Walmart, U.S. Digital sales were up 37%. For Macy's, labor was up double digits as well.

and thus comp store sales were better than Street had expected. Walmart said e-commerce numbers were bullied by grocery, home, and fashion, which drove comp sales up 3.4%, its strongest showing in almost a decade, and 10 basis points better than had been expected. So, it goes to show you just never, never know. And, you know, with the Apple.

The lawsuit against Apple coming up, I'm going to look more into that and talk about that tomorrow. I knew it was coming, but I didn't know that they had made a decision. Actually, it says here, the. Supreme Court rules that a suit over the tech giant's app store can proceed.

The court's 5-4 opinion rejected the tech giant's argument that consumers can't sue the company for escalated prices because the prices are set by developers and not the tech firm. I can understand that argument. But yeah, so that's that. Another headline is UK retailers see no value in 30% of their e-commerce work study fines.

And I thought that was very interesting. I'm going to read a segment of it, a portion of it. Retailers in the U.K. expect 30% of all of their e-commerce work to give them back no value according to a new study commissioned by digital commerce experts Greenlight Commerce.

And this is an article from InternetRetailing.net. The study, which questioned 100 UK-based e-commerce decision makers within the retail sector, found that 99% of retailers are facing some sort of e-commerce challenge, with the main challenges being customer retention, 41% customer experience, 39%, and measuring metrics, 33%. You know, again, Europe and the United Kingdom is a different economy than us, a different culture and everything. And I do know that in Germany, for example, they have a cash– they're big on cash.

And they're not real big on credit cards or debit cards or whatever. So when you go into. A store or a marketplace or the flea market or wherever, whereas if you're in the United States, typically you can use a credit card. It's about anywhere.

In Germany, it's not the case, which I find very interesting. I've heard several people say that. I haven't been there in years, since I was a kid. But I've heard several people say that, and I find it interesting because it's a big tech hub as well, and they have a lot of tech conferences there and that kind of thing.

So I always found that very interesting. So I find it equally interesting that 30% of e-commerce projects We'll give retailers no value back according to InternetRetailing.net in the UK, the United Kingdom. So very interesting stuff. I'm going to go over one more, and I'm going to get into the meat and potatoes of what I'm trying to talk about because I'm going to run out of time once again.

And this one is from DigitalCommerce360, and it says that buyers prefer self-service. e-commerce over sales reps. I mean, you've got to consider the source on this. It's coming from a digital commerce website, so I'm sure there's a little bit of bias going on there.

But it says that, and I swear to you, I think you can find a study to support anything you want to prove or talk about. It says, two studies in recent years by Forrester Research in association with B2Betnews An internet retailer said that business-to-business buyers increasingly favor self-service e-commerce over interacting with a sales rep to research and purchase products. So that's a B2B, business-to-business. So they didn't clarify that in the headline, but still it's interesting because usually a business-to-business...

Usually, they're all about. Sales reps and all that kind of thing. And I know that being in business for myself, I get a lot of sales calls. People wanting to sell me everything under the sun.

And a lot of times when I go to get information for something, they encourage you or they practically force you to talk to a sales rep. They don't give you the pricing information or the information that you want or need. You've got to talk to someone first. They collect your contact information, which I can understand that.

But instead of relaying the needed information, you've got to go through. A sales rep and all that kind of thing. Which I can understand that maybe the conversion rates go up. I don't know.

I know personally... I agree with this website. I don't want to have to talk to a salesman to buy what I want. I want to at least get the information I need and make a decision.

I don't want all the back and forth and all that kind of thing. So, I mean, I can understand. I can understand both sides of it. So, that's all news that is news in e-commerce and internet marketing and affiliate marketing and in the digisphere.

So I'm going to get in the meat and potatoes of this podcast. And start talking about the subject of selling digital products online, the five different approaches that you can. But it's basically speaking of Kim Kardashian and how she encourages her followers. They have an example here, a screenshot of one of her Instagram posts of her with a lollipop in her mouth and she's encouraging her followers to spend $ 30 on lollipops to suppress their appetites in order to achieve.

A flat tummy. And per ecommerceguy.com, they're saying, on the surface, that feels a bit dodgy, and it was picked up by plenty of news outlets, but they all focus. On a very narrow part of the story. That's according to Kim Kardashian, who paid for the ad.

I'm reading again from ecommerceguy.com. You'll note in the Insta post, the. Hashtag, panel, or, slash, or, shit, ad appears again. Kim K was paid for that ad, but none of the news sources really asked who exactly is paying her.

When thinking about that, and the reason they specifically chose Kim K, it feels a bit more sleazy. One, Kim K is chosen firstly because she has a huge profile, but also because a large proportion of her follower base thinks that she is susceptible to influencer marketing. teen range, some a little older, but also some even younger. These are the guys who essentially take Kim Kardashian to do that.

And they have a board of directors. They have four different people. And ecommerceguide.com goes on to say, those are the directors of the Synergy CHC. They buy up or launch brands aimed at growth through influencer marketing.

One of their big successes is they purchased. A brand called Flat Tummy Co. In 2015 from an Australian couple, Tim and Beck Polymer, for $ 10 million Australian. Dollars and have pushed it forward to 1.5 million Instagram followers.

So these are basically people going after buying. buying up mom and pop companies like these e-commerce shops that maybe you can start, and they're buying companies up and promoting the hell out of them using influencer marketing, which I know influencer marketing can be a very, very powerful thing, and these. Four guys have learned that. And they all look like they're over 60.

They're not young guys at all, so... They're very. Forward thinking and they know what they're doing apparently. So anyway, we can only dream, right, that we could be picked up and one of our ideas or websites or whatever is sold.

We get $ 10 million for it. But anyway, you start throwing up, you start throwing enough. Crap, how does that say? You start throwing enough crap at the wall, something will stick, I don't know, something like that. Anyway, that's all the news that is news in e-commerce.

Now I'm going to proceed with the questions and answers section. Of the show here in just a second. Just give me one brief moment. You can listen to this fabulous music that I've chosen just for you.

Yes, you. Just a second. You are listening to. The Digipire podcast for May the 20th, 2019.

You can follow along with the outline at digipire.com slash episode nine. Okay, now for the questions and enter segment of this very interesting podcast. I hope you guys will learn a lot by the time we finish with this. And I will not.

Be able to cover everything, of course. You can look at the outline for this program. and all of the links to the websites that I mentioned at digipire.com slash episode 9. And there you will find, like I said, all of the links that I have, that I mentioned in this project, and a lot more that I did not, that I was not able to, that I will not be able to go over, that I will not be able to go over today.

because I'm just not going to have enough time. There's just so much to tell you guys and so much knowledge that I want to impart to you that there just is not enough time, is there? Maybe one day I can. Just upload it to you and you just have it for however you need to use it. But for now, we must do it the hard way.

And so now we are going to go over the questions and answers. And the first one is, We're talking about Amazon publishing again today. Do you have to use your own name when publishing on Amazon? And the answer is no. You can have, I think, as many pen names as you want.

I don't think there's a limit. There might be. But, you know, say, for example, that you want to write in. If you want to write a thriller novel or you want to write something that's controversial but you don't want to have your personal name attached to it or maybe you just want to maintain your privacy, then you can use a pen name for that.

So you want to write in different genres, you can have a pen name for each genre. The second question is how many pin names can you use? I'm not sure on Amazon, but as far as personally, you can use as many pin names as you want depending on the platform that you use to publish. You have a lot of different options, and you can manipulate it in a lot of different ways. So it's really just up to you.

And so the number of pin names you can use, you can use as many as you want. But it depends on the platform that you're using, how many they will allow and that kind of thing. So a lot of times I hear this question and I hear it discussed or whatnot. And is it dishonest to use a pen name and hiding your real name? Basically, they're wanting to know, is it dishonest.

To use a pen name? And I don't think it is. We can sit here and debate that all day long, but it's something that's been going on since the beginning of time. There's the beginning of literature, whatever. People have been doing it for a long, long time.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, people have been doing it a long time. I don't think it's going to change anytime soon. I don't think it's dishonest. It is standard practice in the industry.

And it's nothing shady. People don't view it as shady. You know, J.K. Rowling does it.

There's a lot of famous authors that do it. So, no, I don't think that it's dishonest in that regard. Number four is how much money can you make as an Amazon writer. Some people make nothing.

Some people make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year. Or the lifetime or whatever. It all depends on your marketing skills, who you link up to market your book, or if you do it yourself. It just entirely depends on marketing.

It entirely depends on you, your audience, and all that kind of thing, how much effort you want to put into it. I swear, I think you can have a crappy book, and I've heard this said many times before, and I know it from personal experience, from just promoting other stuff that was not like the best, but you can have a subpar book book or out you know that's not the best but you can have someone that really knows how to market it and the sales can be better than one that the that the book is you know excellent but they just didn't market it as good or properly or whatever so it just entirely depends i mean like anything in business or anything outside of a of a linear income or outside of a job entirely depends on you and your tolerance for risk and your tolerance for The ups and downs of business and all of that stuff. But really, there's really no limit. And there's really no limit to the amount of money that you can lose as well.

You can put a lot of money into marketing. You can hire someone to market your book that doesn't know what they're doing. You pay them $ 1, 000. To market your cookbook, and they're selling it to people that are interested in thrillers.

They're not going to buy it. They're not going to read it. So there's a lot of little caveats that you need to be concerned about, and you really need to study marketing and study that stuff or find someone who knows what they're doing because that will determine. The success or failure of your book.

So there's no limit to how much money you can make, and there's no limit to how much money you can. Lose as well. It goes both ways. It's kind of like the duality of life, isn't it? Yeah.

So is there a limit to how many books you can publish? Again, there's no limit depending on the publisher that you use or if you're self-publishing. I don't think Amazon puts a limit on how many you can publish. I know that if you're putting out junk. Don't put out private label rights stuff or machine-generated content.

You're going to get caught, and they're going to shut you down. They have algorithms in place that will catch that, and you'll be out of business before you even start. So my advice to you is do not try to peddle any garbage. Don't try to peddle any garbage.

garbage on Amazon because you will get caught and you will get shut down. So try to do everything right the first time and you should be okay. I don't think that they put. A limit that I know of on the number of books that you can publish.

What's the minimum number six? What's the minimum length? of the book for it to be accepted into Amazon. I'm not sure about that. I've seen books with as little as 15 pages that do very, very well on Amazon, so I'm not sure that there's a minimum length or a maximum length. I'm sure it would have to be at least a few pages, I would think, but I am not sure about that.

That's something that you would have to look up, maybe on Google or something. I'm not exactly sure, but I would think... I think it would be wise to have, you know, at least a 15 to 30 page book. I've seen them.

I've seen a lot of books in that range. And last but not least, the last question is, can anyone publish on Amazon? And I would think yes, as long as you have not, if you're not on Amazon's. Shit list for whatever reason. If you haven't been banned by them before or they have some other kind of problem with you, I would think that anyone would be able to publish on Amazon.

So that concludes our question and answer session of the podcast. If you have any questions for me or something that you want to tell me or comment on anything that I discuss here on this podcast or any other podcast or any other episode that I have done, you can do so through my contact button on digipire.com. In just a. Few short seconds, we will start with the meat and potatoes, so to speak, of this episode and get into why you should self-publish and the benefit, the advantages and disadvantages, and how to go from there.

So just give me a short moment, please. You are listening to. The Digipire podcast for May the 20th, 2019. You can follow along with the outline at digipire.com slash episode nine.

Okay, so why self-publishing? Why would you want to self-publish and do that on Amazon or any of the other platforms. That are available for the writer? Well, first of all, it can be very difficult and expensive to get linked up with a major publisher. You know, the fear of rejection is gone. You can publish at your leisure.

And you are not limited on the scope or number of books you can write. And as I previously mentioned, you can have as many pen names for each genre that. You want to write in. If you don't want your name associated with a hot topic, you can use a pen name.

You know, a lot of famous authors do it. J.K. Rowling does it. She's actually a very interesting person.

She's a very interesting person. Just Google famous authors who use pen names, and I'm sure. You'll be surprised at what you'll discover. If you research J.K.

Rowling herself while you're at it, she just has a very interesting story. She's really intrigued me. She really has pulled herself up from being very, very low in her life, and. Just gives you hope, the average person hope, that they can do the same.

So look her up. She's very, very interesting. One of the other things, the good thing about self-publishing, you get faster exposure, you get your message gets to the masses much quicker. Than if you had gone the traditional route.

The royalties are higher, Amazon pays upwards of 75%, and you have more creative control. The typical publishing. House will offer the author 10-15% of each book sold. Again, Amazon will pay you 75% or more.

There are some disadvantages of self-publishing, though, as with everything. It's a balancing act. You have to balance the pluses and the negatives, the pros and the cons, right? So it's up to you to market your book. That's one of the big disadvantages of self-publishing.

A lot of people assume that Amazon will do that for them, similar to the way that their e-commerce platform works, that if you put something up for sale, that they do all the marketing and it'll sell. It's not the case when you submit an e-book to their platform. It's up to you to do. The marketing yourself, which that can be a good thing and a bad thing.

I mean, a good thing and a bad thing, but it is a thing. So it's something that you have to consider when you are self-publishing. And again, that money will come out of your own pocket. You're taking the chance that the marketing will fail, that all the money that you have will go down the toilet.

So another thing, another disadvantage of self-publishing is the stigma. And less acclaim. A lot of people will not self-publish just because it's not respected in some circles. So it just depends on where you are in your life, you know, what your deal is.

It's just you need to take that into consideration. It's not for everyone. So my thing is, if you're not, I mean.... It gives you a way to get your message out to the masses that otherwise you may not.

So, again, it's not for everyone, so just take that into consideration. Authors may not get the exposure they would otherwise if they went with a traditional book publisher. There's also no editor, no design support, so you have to do your own editing or hire them. So that's another expense that you will have to incur, right? And you'll be responsible for getting your own cover art done, which all that stuff can be outsourced through Fiverr, through Freelancer.com, or if you have a friend that you can pay to do that.

It can all be done, or if you can do it yourself, it's even better. But it can be done fairly easily or fairly inexpensively, but it's still a cost that you need to consider. So, how do you get started? I mean, once you clear. The way and you decide you want to self-publish, how do you get started? Well, the first thing you need to do is find a niche.

Find a niche that you want to write in. Find a genre you want to write in. And I use a tool called Publisher Rocket to find hot niches because I take the approach that I write around niches. instead of writing just what I'm, well, you know, it's good to write what you're passionate about, but if it's not going to make you any money, then what's the point? So I try to find niches that, you know, revolve around my passions and revolve around my set, my expertise, and I write in them, and I use the appropriate pen name.

To do that in. So, like I said, I use a tool called PublisherRocket.com to do that, and you can find that resource on my website, Digiplier.com. And writing in popular niches will get you the best impact for the time and money that you spend. And I think that's very, very important.

You can hire a ghostwriter through iWriter and Freelancer.com if you don't have the time to do it yourself. You can even use a tool. You can use a tool. What's the tool? I can't think of it.

I have a bookmark. But it's from LiteratureandLatte.com. It's called Scrivener. But it's a tool that will help you outline...

And keep track of your writing. You can take notes. You can do research and all that kind of thing. It's just like a one-stop shop to pull everything that you need in to write your book.

And it's very, very nice. I use that and actually a combination of that and Airtable.com that I've made specifically for that purpose. And I use both of those tools. So it really comes in handy.

So you can outsource part of a book and you can write the other. You can get started with a ghostwriter and then write around it. You can have, you know, just whatever you want to do. I mean, it's pretty much unlimited on the way, the approach that you can take.

But using those tools, you can stay organized. Right now, it's working through ghostwriter. And you can ultimately publish your book with that Scrivener from literatureandlatte.com. You can also publish your book in the EPUB format, which is the format that Amazon requires.

And again, you can find that link at my website, digipire.com. It's in the resources section. Actually, it's in the, if you go to digipire.com slash episode 9, all the resources that I mention. Here will be there.

And so that leaves us with marketing your e-book. Just a second. Hold on. Hold on.

I'm sorry. Just a second. Hold on. Just a second.

So that leaves us with marketing your e-book. Like I said, Amazon does not market the book for you, so some good sites to use are bookbub.com and smashwords.com to promote your book. Smashwords will actually distribute your book electronically to thousands and thousands of libraries in the U.S., South America, Europe, and that can really get you some really good exposure. I encourage you to visit their website, smashwords.com, and find your way around.

Just do some research on it. It's highly interesting what all you get with their service. BookBub is also an excellent place to market your book. They give you a number of subscribers to their list.

They give you a page. There's a page. Again, it's a link at digitpilot.com slash episode 9. They give you a number of subscribers to their list that they have broken down by category and the number of downloads and sales that are typical when someone promotes their product.

Book in that category. For example, if you were to cookbook, it'd cost you $ 854 according to the website to promote your book. If it was a dollar or less, keep in mind it's more as the price of the book increases, but for a dollar, you could expect 24,400 free downloads and according to their. Website, 2,060 sales.

So, That would be something that you could do, but you want to make sure that you put as many revenue-generating opportunities in. The e-book itself as possible, linking them to. Your website that has email collection forms so that you can follow up and sell other e-books or even have a page where they go to Google AdSense. Just make it as sticky as you possibly can.

so you can just extract as much revenue as you can from every promotional. Method that you choose. So yeah, that's pretty much it for a basic understanding, a basic explanation of. Self-publishing.

I talk about it extensively on my website, digipire.com, and I've also linked. everything that I've mentioned in this. Episode there at digitpilot.com slash episode 9. So that is all for me today.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their Monday. I will be back here with you tomorrow at 8 p.m. sharp. And if you have any questions for me or if you have any comments or suggestions or gripes, you can submit them at my website, digipire.com.

And I'll see you guys tomorrow. Bye-bye. so so Thank you. Thank you for watching.

You have been listening to the Digipire podcast. You can find us at digipire.com. Thank you for listening. Thank you.