3 Secrets of Self-Publishing Success...
This afternoon, I was on Reedsy LIVE and shared three secrets of self-publishing success. Check out the video:
Here are some additional references from that mini-workshop:
SECRET #1: A Kick-Butt Blurb
Want clear directions for building a great blurb? This video details why your book's blurb is crucially important and shares my easy equation for creating one:
Want to watch Part 2 of this video? Enroll in the How to Market Your Course today and dive into over 30 video lessons on building your brand and increasing sales!
SECRET #2: The Most Important Social Network
Goodreads is the ONLY social network that caters exclusively to readers, and it is a crucial piece of my success.
The below video walks you through the free promotional tools that exist on Goodreads, most of which are unknown to most authors. In the next eleven minutes, you can find out how to take advantage of the website that has over 55 million members - ALL of whom are readers and reviewers.
Need more of a beginner's course in Goodreads? Click here for a video on claiming your author profile and adding a new book.
The below video will show you:
How to Make Status Updates on Goodreads
How to Create Blog Posts that will notify Goodreads users 10+ times
How to Create Events for Releases
Where to put promotional items such as teasers and purchase links
How to Create a Goodreads Giveaway
Want more book marketing advice? Enroll in my How to Market Your eBook course and give yourself the knowledge to properly promote your novel.
SECRET #3: Finding and Creating a Network
There is strength in numbers, and making alliances with other authors isn't just a smart move - it's a necessary one. Here are some rules for networking success:
Find authors similar to yourself. It doesn't make sense for a superstar to partner up with a newbie. You want to find equitable networking partners - approach and introduce yourself to authors who:
write in your genre
have similar numbers of social media followers
have strong reviews and a similar style to yours
release a similar number of novels per year
Be professional. Authors will avoid other authors that they view to be 'pot-stirrers' or 'drama queens'. Be pleasant and professional in your interactions, be prompt in communication, and honor your commitments.
Form a group. Have some accountability between your members and set clear rules and expectations. Cross promote each others' sales, releases and cover reveals. Feature each other in your newsletters. Their success will mean more success for you.
I hope this was helpful! If you are serious about finding self-publishing success, enroll in my How to Market Your Novel online course! You can take it at your own pace, the content never expires, and you can rewatch lessons at any time!
Thanks for tuning into my Reedsy LIVE workshop! Check out Reedsy here, and enroll in my How to Market Your Book course here.
Full Transcripts:
The 3 SelfPublishing Secrets of a Bestselling Author w Alessandra Torre Reedsy Live
Welcome. My name is Alessandra Torre. I'm a New York times bestselling author of 15 novels. I write romance and suspense novels, and I also launched a year ago, Alessandra Ink, which is a website for aspiring and currently published authors. And it has a series of a bunch of free content, but also online courses in writing publishing and marketing your books. So, that's who I am. And I started out in self-publishing. I am now hybrid. I have two traditional publishers as well as the majority of my books are self-published, but I have hit the New York times list six times. And every time I hit the New York times list, it was with a self-published book, so you absolutely confined self-publishing success. My self-published books are more successful than my traditionally published books. And I'm going to talk to you about that today, how I found success, how you can find success in the things that really worked for me.
Today, I'm going to share three secrets of self-publishing success. And again, I'm going to answer questions in between each secret. So if you have a question, just shout it out via the comment section whenever it comes to you. Now, the first secret launched my entire career, and I'm going to tell you a brief story before I reveal that secret and that is when I first published, self-published my first book. It was in 2012, I had a grand total of three sales on release day. That slowly grew to five to 15 sales a day. And I was like that for a month, maybe almost two months. And at that point in time, I made one change and that one change literally overnight; my book went from 15 sales a day to a hundred. And then the next day I was at 300 sales a day. And literally my sales doubled every single day until I was selling 2000 copies a day, I was ranked in the top 15 on Amazon. Publishers and agents were calling me, and I ended up signing a six-figure book deal within a week or two weeks of achieving that rank on Amazon.
So I'm going to tell you that one change and that's my first secret. And it's so simple. It's so easy to literally do it today when we get off this workshop, and that is that I changed my blurb. And by blurb I mean the book's description on Amazon. When you pull up Nook or I books or any retailer site, when you pull that up and you see the one to three paragraph description of your book and that description paired with your cover and your review and your price is what makes readers decide to either find your book or move on to the next. And it was a whim. I was just sitting there looking at my description one day and I thought, you know what? I am going to rewrite this. And I rewrote it. And if it wasn't for that one, for that 15 minutes that I spent on that one day, I would not have the career I today, I strongly believe that, because that really changed everything for me.
And so the moral of this secret is, first of all, I'm going to talk to you about three rules I have for blurbs and then I'll tell you the moral secret. So three rules I have for blurbs and I had an entire video on my website. Reedsy is going to share the link with it at the end of this Reedsy live, but three quick rules I have for blurbs. One, be concise. Nobody wants to read a five to seven paragraph long blurb. So if you can cut your blurb down to two to three paragraphs, that's ideal. The second thing cut out unnecessary details. A lot of times I'll read blurbs and they've got full first and last names of all the characters in the books and the cities and States that those locations are. They share unnecessary details when they can just summarize all of that.
You don't need to educate the readers on every character in the book in that blurb and everything that happens in the blurb. So be concise, don't spoil the book, don't give too much away and try to shorten it down. And the other tip I have for you is that the first three sentences of your blurb are the most important. And it's really the first three lines of your blurb because that's what shows up on the Amazon description page. And they have to click, you know, more information to see the rest of your blurb. You got to grab them with those first three sentences. Those are crucially important. If you spend any time at all, spend time on this first three sentences because you never know. What I learned with my first book is that readers were clicking on my cover, reading my blurb, and then, you know, moving on to another book.
So you don't know right now today, how many readers you're losing because of your blurb. And that gets the same with everything; cover and price, change things around. If a book has grown stagnant, if your release isn't going as you expect it to be; change things. Change things, look at the impact, you can always change it back later if you don't like how they turn out. So to wrap up; secret number one, a great blurb. The secret number two, it has to do with social media, and it's about the number one social media network that is absolutely ignored by 90% of authors, and that is Goodreads. And if you're not familiar with Goodreads, it's goodreads.com. It's owned by Amazon, has over 55 million members, and it's the only social network that is a hundred percent devoted to readers. All it's about is talking about books, sharing books, recommending books, and reviewing books. That is the sole focus of the website. There is absolutely no reason why every author in the world isn't clamoring to get onto Goodreads, but oh my gosh, authors love to avoid Goodreads like the plague.
And I've heard so many times, Oh, I'm never going to go on good reads or, Oh, I'm going to avoid good reads, and it's because authors are scared because they hear that readers are mean, or that they're talking negatively about authors and books. And I have to tell you, I spend 20% of my online time on Goodreads and I don't come in contact with that. I'm certain, there are trolls, there are trolls everywhere, but you can easily avoid them. Stay out of drama and focus on the positive. Goodreads is a necessity for a self-published author. And I'm going to say that one more time, Goodreads is a necessity. If you want to be successful, you need to at minimum have an author profile on Goodreads and have all of your books updated so that readers can find you, and so that they can recommend those books.
I have video tutorials and walkthroughs on everything that you need to do on Goodreads, but this is huge and this is important. And an example of that, one of my books, The Ghostwriter was just nominated for Goodreads choice award. The day that it was nominated, I got an email from an audio book company who wanted to purchase the rights to it, and I got an email from a Bulgaria... from a publishing company in Bulgaria who wanted to purchase you know, those rights to that. Because Goodreads is a worldwide market, people pay attention. You know, you have no idea how much publishers are paying attention to that. Foreign publishers, audio book publishers, everybody is watching Goodreads, watching the books they're talking on Goodreads. You can get discovered there so easily.
So absolutely, create your author profile, claim your books, and then promote those books on Goodreads And I have a step-by-step videos, free videos about how to do that, how to promote sales, how to promote releases, cover reveals, everything. Don't forget Goodreads. It's very important. If you have a reader on Goodreads, a traditional normal reader who isn't super active; if they read your book, add it to their list, read it, review it, and then take it off their list; that's three times your book showed up in their Goodreads newsfeed. If you have an active review on Goodreads, who interacts with other people, your book could show up 15 or 20 times in their newsfeed. Think about that level of exposure. There's no way you can convince a reader. Doesn't matter how passionate they are about your book, about promoting your book 15 or 20 times in their newsfeed. Goodreads, that happens every single day in that Goodreads newsfeed so it's really important.
Someone said, what are some Goodreads groups you would suggest to join? The SHH which is S H H if you're a romance author, the SHH group, which is S H H, if you just search S H H it's one of the largest groups on Goodreads, I started it with Sofi who is a Goodreads queen, but it has great promotional opportunities for any authors. It's all author fan group. Search for your genre and you're going to find groups associated with that. Join the groups, reach out to the moderators, ask if you can offer arcs to their most, you know active members, ask how you can promote your book. They're going to be super helpful, and they're going to be interested in helping you. I'm going to move on to the third question. I will come back to a lot of these in the Q and A, but I'm going to talk about the third secret.
So, first secret was blurbs, second secret, Goodreads. You can tell I'm really passionate about Goodreads. And then the third secret is networking with other authors. And while writing is a very solitary activity, promoting your book is not. One of the best ways to get exposure is through partnering up with other authors and cross-promoting. And it's not just cross-promoting, networking is cross-promoting. It's also building relationships with other authors and sharing information because I can right now tell you 15 marketing strategies that don't work. And they are 15 marketing strategies that I didn't waste time and effort in doing my friends did. And they came to me and they said, "Alessandra I tried this and I might as well just lit money on fire". Great, that's information I can use. So, you want to create author friendships network with other authors, so you can share what works, what does that, because as much as they tell me what didn't work, they also tell me what works and I did the same for them, and we can all grow together.
So again, author networking, one, for cross-promotion, two, to learn from each other and learn from your mistakes and help each other out, and three it's a support system. My husband does not understand the frustration that I go through when, you know, I've hit writer's block, or I just wasted 14 hours of my life formatting a book, it's garbage, you know, and he doesn't understand that. It's a great place you can vent, you can learn, you can lean on it and you can get support. So author networking is very important and you might be saying to me, "Okay, that's great Alessandra, how do I network with other authors? How do I find these people? You know, what do I do?" So, I'm going to give you a few tips for often networking first, when the best places to find them as conventions, no matter what your genre. I attended the Utopia convention, that's a ton of YA and fantasy. Romance Writers of America and RT is great for romance authors. Thriller Fest is great for mystery and suspense. Search your genre, search conventions; you're going to find something. So that's one way.
If you don't have the money or the desire to travel to a place and meet a bunch strangers online groups is great. I have Alessandra Torre Inkers, that's a Facebook group I have with thousands of authors and aspiring authors. Start becoming active in Facebook groups, especially Facebook groups that are for writers of your genre, and you're going to start making friends. You're going to start seeing names pop out, and it's harder if you're a brand new author. So don't feel like you got to make a ton of, you know, author connections as a brand new author, but once you are publishing and especially if you're publishing on a regular basis, then it's time to form an author group. And an author group is you reaching out and finding five or six authors that are similar to you, similar to you in terms of number of followers, similar to you in genre and writing style and similar to you in amount of production, how many books they write per year.
Once you find that perfect blend, create a pack, create a group with these authors and say, you know, I literally almost had a business relationship with six other authors where we all agree to very precise rules, which is whenever one of us had a cover reveal, a sale or released, all of us would promote that on our social media networks. So what that meant is my reach of at the time 5,000 people, this was several years ago when I was first starting out, 5,000 people suddenly got multiplied by six. Six of us all with about 5,000 followers we're all promoting my sale and my cover reveal. And what that caused is for each of our sale cover reveal and releases to be six times more successful. And when all of us were more successful, all of our follower numbers grew, all of us had more power and we could help each other out. So can you benefit in those relationships by helping each other out. It's huge. Networking is absolutely huge. Form an author group, if not, just form friendships, they're crucially important, and that's my third secret. And it's been great. Thank you, Reedsy for having me. Again, please check out Alessadratorreink.com for a bunch of free resources. And my top 10 posts there is videos and information to help supplement what I talked about today. And thank you all for having me. It's been great to see you.
The Blurb Equation How to Write A KickButt Blurb
I want to tell you a quick story. And that's about my very first book called Blindfolded Innocence. I self-published Blindfold Innocence, and on day one had a staggering three sales. My sales slowly grew to about 15 or 20 sales per day, where they just kind of stayed for about a month. Didn't do much ,didn't grow; I had reviews slowly, trickling but not much activity happened. Then I made one single change. I rewrote my blurb. And what we call blurb is the description that's on your sales page, on all the vendors. And it's also what's on the back copy of your book of your paperback. I changed my blur and overnight my sales skyrocketed. I went from 20-ish sales per day to a hundred and then to 300, and then to 3000. I was selling 3000 copies a day, 10 days after I changed my blurb. And that was literally the only change.
I didn't change my price. I didn't change my cover. I did not change a single thing except my blurb. And that showed me, instantly I realized how many people had been clicking on my book, raving, the book's description or the blurb, and then deciding not to buy the book. And just by changing that blurb, I was able to catch those sales, and literally that difference created my entire career. I could have very easily been happy with those 20 sales, gotten distracted, done something else with my life. Instead, I've written 14 books, I'm an international bestseller all because I changed my blurb, that book exploded and gave me the confidence to write more and more and more. So blurb is a very, very important, I would almost say it's the most important thing.
The cover is crucially important. I think the covers the most important thing to get readers to look at your book, but once they look at your book, the blurb is going to be what convinces them to actually buy it. And just think about when you walk through a bookstore, a cover might catch your eye, you pick it up, you look at it, but then what do you do? You turn around, turn the book around and you read the back cover copy. And that is what's going to make you go ehh and stick it back on the shelf or yes, I'm going to buy this book, take it with me and devour it tonight. So again, very important, so let's find out and let's talk about how to write an awesome blurb. It is super easy and I'm going to tell you how to do it right now.
Using the blurb equation. So the blurb equation is very simple and it needs to short. I say that there are exceptions. Sometimes you just can't summarize everything in... Game of Thrones, the book that led to that, I'm pretty sure it's how they link the blurb. If you have a fantasy novel, you might need a longer blurb. If you're writing historical fiction, you might need a longer blurb. You might not though, okay. And if you can keep it shorter, you have a better chance of capturing the reader's attention. So if your blurb is more than five paragraphs, more than four full paragraphs, it's too long, my opinion. Unless you have a novel that warrants it, keep it short. And I have a couple of books here, and most of them are three paragraphs. Each one is two or three sentences long, so that's what we're going to focus on and that can be your goal this exercise right now.
Here's the blurb equation. First, you need to introduce; introduce your characters or introduce your situation. By situation I mean, if a pivotal part of your story... Devil in the White City, if you've read that book, it's a historical fiction novel that is set at the time of the World's Fair in the Chicago World's Fair, so that is like a huge part of the novel. The entire novel revolves from the World's Fair. So that first introductory paragraph, and this is either going to be typically one to two paragraphs long, and each paragraph needs to be two to three, two to four, maybe two to three sentences, two to four sentences long. So if you have a book like that and or again, your whole book revolves around a pivotal timeframe, event or situation, then use that info for them.
If your book is character driven, use the introduction on your character. If your book is a romance novel, it's going to be character driven 99% of the time. So you can do a paragraph for each character, or you can do one paragraph that summarizes both characters. So in a romance, the intro is typically going to introduce characters. If you're in a mystery, or a suspense or a thriller, it might introduce the fact that a serial killer is attacking town XYZ, so far, eight people have died and they don't have any leads. You know, that's your intro, and that is going to be the first one to two paragraphs of your blur.
Then a hint at what your book is about, what the climax is, and what the conflict is. Why are they reading about this? You don't just say, you know, there is a carnival that comes to town every year that brings strangers into the town of Welmont. Okay, that was your introduction. Great. We can picture it; a carnival coming into town. So what, like why do we care about this carnival? What does the carnival have to do with the story? Like, give us more information. That is the second part of that. Or you have two people in your romance novel, the hero and the heroine. Now that we know about them, are they going to meet, do they ever know who the other person is? Like, what's the rest of the story? So that is the second part. You are going to hint at what is to come.
Don't give away the whole plot. Please don't give away the whole plot, but give this paragraph to give a hint at what the core conflict of your book is, and then end it with a cliffy. End it with a line that leaves the reader dying to know what's going to happen. You know, little did they know the biggest mystery was yet to come. Use something like that. Use a last line that really hooks them in. A lot of people like to use their last line to allude to why they chose the title. That's not my thing. I'm not crazy about that. If an example of that, like this book was Hollywood Dirt. An example of that would be if I said "By the end of it, the dirt in this town raked up Hollywood, or on our country, in our country town, dirt was bound to come up one way or another," something like that.
I'm doing a terrible job because, you know, or in my book Trophy Wife, they would end it with saying "Maybe I shouldn't have become a trophy wife." I don't know, a lot of authors like to tie in their title somehow in the end. Again, that's not my thing, but if that just appeals to you, then by all means some readers, you know, a lot of readers like it too. So you could do that, but I like to leave them on a cliffhanger type sentence that really hooks the reader. So, that's the blurb equation. Intro hint is to the climax of the conflict of your story and end on a cliffy. Now, let's talk about what to do and not to do with your blurb.
How to Promote Your Book Release on Goodreads
This video is going to show you how to properly launch your book on Goodreads and the free tools that you can use in order to promote that book on Goodreads. So first let's talk about what to do. You are an author, you are preparing for a release. You have a book, you want to promote it using Goodreads, how do you do that? Step one, add your book to Goodreads. If you don't know how to do that, I have a separate video, it's below in the comment section or in the note section of this video. So number one, add your book to Goodreads. There's a place to put a cover. If you don't have a cover yet, that's fine. If you want to wait until your cover revealed, that's fine, but if you have a cover and it's been shared, it's been, you know, it's public, then definitely add your cover; that's a great way to catch reader's attention.
There's a blurb section. Hopefully you have a blurb. Blurbs are one of the most important things to readers. We have survey results that will show that in a moment. So definitely put your blurb there. There's a place to put a release date. If you only have a vague idea when the release date is, put it there, but mark your calendar to come back and update that release date because readers will wait and depend on that release date, so you want to make sure to keep that updated. And there's a quote section of Goodreads. If you just Google Goodreads quotes, it will take you to the quote section of Goodreads. You can add tantalizing lines from your book there. Goodreads will ask you, is it from a certain book? You can put your book in there once your book has been added to Goodreads and they will then see that. So it's a great way to give readers a little peek at what is contained in the book and maybe, you know, spark their interest.
Once you finish adding your book to Goodreads, it's going to give you a link. It might not give it to you, but when you view it, you can go up to the top browser and highlight and copy and paste that link. You want to share that link constantly. Any time you post about your upcoming book, anytime you post about writing that book, struggling with that book, working on that cover. Anytime you talk about your book, share that link so that people can be adding it to their shelves. Every time a Goodreads user adds that to their want to read shelf, it does a number of things. It lets their friends know about the book. It puts that on their Goodreads newsfeed. It sometimes causes Goodreads to email them and let them know once that book releases. It can trigger a lot of great things, so share that link all the time. Once your book is live, create a blog, post, create a status update. I'm going to talk about both of those things next.
First, status updates, status updates are the number one under-utilized tool of Goodreads that no author seems to use. And they are great. I'm going to tell you all about them right now, first, how to do them? This right here is your Goodreads home page. Here, if you click home, it will take you to this page. This is your newsfeed, these are what you're currently reading, and right here, there's place called general update. If you click on that, it'll open this little pop-up box and you can do a general update. It doesn't have to be about a book. It can just be about your life. It could be about fact that you just sent a newsletter out. It could be the fact that you have a cover reveal coming up. It could be promoting a release promo sign up that you have or a new excerpt. It does limit you to 420 characters, so you do have to be fairly concise with this, so you do have to be fairly concise about this. Then you're just going to click save and it's going to go live.
This is great to use whenever a cover is revealed, preordered links go live if you have any excerpts available, if any teasers are available, or if you have a sale or a giveaway. Now let's talk about blog post. Blog posts you want to use less often, maybe two a month would be better because what's going to happen is when you post that blog post, Goodreads is going to promote it for you and put it on your followers newsfeeds every few hours. It will probably cause it to show up in their newsfeed eight to 10 times, so blog posts get a ton of exposure. I like to use them when the cover is revealed and I include the blurb and any links or any excerpts I have in that. You've got plenty of room on the blog post, so you can go crazy.
I also do want to pre-order links go live, or if I have a teaser or an excerpt, I definitely do a blog post on release day, and I do want any other time that I have news. If I'm sending out a newsletter, I can do a blog post. If I have big exciting news, I'll do a blog post. If I just finished a book or just added one to Goodreads, I'll do a blog post. Other free tools you can use to promote your new release, a Goodreads giveaway. Goodreads giveaways are great. The only thing they cost you is the cost of the prize, which is typically a paperback. Some people do three paperbacks or five paperbacks. I normally do two or three paperbacks. If you Google Goodreads giveaway, you'll see the link and where to go and it will walk you through the steps of adding a giveaway. It will not allow you to create a giveaway until the book is on Amazon. Either the paperback is on Amazon or the ebook is on Amazon. I think the paperback has to be on Amazon in order for you to create it. So if you run into that issue, that's why, if it won't let you do it, it'll tell you it'll say I can't find this book on Amazon. But I also set the timeframe pretty short; I do it for like three to five days. This is the link to the contest, and in order for readers to enter, they have to add your book to their “to be read” list, which really amps up the exposure of it. So it's a great win-win for both parties; it gives your book exposure and gives them a chance to win.
Listopia. If you have a book that fits perfectly in a certain category; if it's a paranormal romance and there's a list opiate list for it that talks about the 10 best paranormal romances of the year. Ask your readers to nominate your book for that Listopia. Listopia is great for search engine optimization. If someone Googles best paranormal romances of 2017, one of the first thing that's going to show up is that Goodreads Listopia lists, and so you want your books on lists that they apply to. You don't want to just blanket lists that have nothing to do with your book, you know because that's really going to give you a bad reputation on Goodreads. But if there are lists that specifically apply to your book, then by all means, ask your readers to add your book to those lists and then ask your readers to vote for your book on those lists and that will increase the chances of it hitting higher and higher on this list where it has the best exposure.
Release day events; release day events are another huge underutilized tool that Goodreads offers that is free and it has great exposure. So I will do a separate video on how to create an event, how to invite your friends and how to get the most impact. But that is something you need to add to your to-do list when you're doing a release checklist, when you're looking at different tools to do a release day event and invite all of your Goodreads friends. Goodreads also has paid advertising you can use. I honestly have never had a lot of success using Goodreads advertising, doesn't mean that you won't, doesn't mean that your genre might be different than my genre. Doesn't mean that I couldn't very easily have not known what the heck I was doing and that's why my Goodreads advertising wasn't successful. But the last thing is the review section of your book.
So if you go into your own book and click to leave a review for your book, you are now in your review section and it's just like any other person's review section of your book, but this one's yours, so you have control over it. First of all, do not give yourself a certain amount of stars. Don't give yourself any stars at all. Ignore that section altogether. What you want to use your review section is for the following things. We asked... looks like 1600 people responded and ask what would they like to see authors add to this section? Number one thing, book release information, tell them when the book's releasing and where they can get it.
If you have purchased or pre-order links, that's the place to put them, Goodreads will not allow you to put them in the description section of your book, but you can put them in your review section. If you have any teasers, stick them in there. It's a great place to put teasers. If you have an excerpt, put it in there. If you have any giveaways going on, put the links there. If it's a giveaway that's happening on another social media like it's Facebook giveaway, I wouldn't put that link there, but if you have a standard Rafflecopter or if you're just running a giveaway on your website, or if you want to do a Goodreads giveaway, if you want to say, Hey, add this book to your “to be read” list, and you could be entered to win click here to fill out a Google form and enter; that's the place to put it.
And if you have a sign up for them to request advanced copies, that's when an arc is, an advance review copy. If you have a link to either promotion signups or to request an arc, also, it's very important. You can see, 70% of people ask to be told if it's part of the series. They do not want to be surprised. They were very passionate in their response on this. Tell them if it's part of a series, it has a cliffhanger ending, if it is part of a standalone series; give them information about that so they know what they're getting into. So, that's what you want to put your review section. And this, I incorrectly underutilized this section for a really long time. I used trackable purchase links in my last release in this review section and I sold three to 400 books from that reviews section, specifically from links in that review section, I sold three or 400 books, so you could be leaving serious sales on the table by not using that review section.
Again, do not start your books but do use all of these things. So these are the free tools that you can use to prepare for your release, won't cost you a thing. Only thing that cost you anything in this section is a giveaway if it's the cost of the prize or Goodreads advertising, which again, I haven't had luck in, but you might. So I hope this video was helpful. If you enjoyed it, please share it with others, and I hope to see you on Goodreads soon.
