How Rob Dircks sold 1,000 copies of his book
Rob Dircks posted a great article over at Goldfinch Publishing, titled How I Sold, 1,000 copies of my book in three months
There's a great video to go along with the post as well (embedded at the bottom of this post).
Here are the steps he took (summarized with permission from Rob, thanks Rob!)
1. Wrote the Book
Pretty self-explanatory but worth noting, you can't sell a book until you finish it!
2. Setup the website, landing page, social media and Amazon pages.
Rob gave some great tips on how to do all these things.
3. Got more active on Goodreads.
4. Lined up 25 Amazon Reviews before launch
These days this is really important, Rob linked to a mini-course by Tim Grahl on how to do this, and boiled it down to offering 75 people an advance read of the book and then staying on top of them to make sure they read it and reviewed it.
Side Note: if you want to send out 75 copies and know who has read it and what they think about it, a great way would be to post your book on BetaBooks. You'll be able to track each invitation, see who has accepted it and how many chapters they've read, which makes it really easy to know who to bug. They're also likely to leave comments at the end of chapters, so you can know who really liked the book (so you know who you really need to make sure posts that Amazon review).
5. Publish the Book
Rob is an expert on the publishing part, he actually setup Goldfinch Publishing to help other authors get this done. I checked out the services page and I have to say it looks like a really great offering, something I'll keep bookmarked for sure.
6. Enrolled in KDP Select to take advantage of Countdown Deals and KU/KOLL
This one is a little bit more controversial, since not everyone likes reinforcing Amazon's dominance over the self-publishing market, and others (like me) really like reading via iBooks and hate for their stuff not to be on the iBooks store. However I think it's important to know that Kindle Unlimited is working for a lot of authors, so it's really worth looking into.
7. Gave Copies Away
8. Begged for Exposure
9. Used paid promotions
Rob listed some great resources and broke down what worked and what it cost.
10. Created an audiobook
This is really cool, audiobooks are becoming a bigger and bigger deal, and Rob has another article about how you can make one yourself. This ties into something I've mentioned before, how important it is to be reading your book out loud (and maybe recording it?).
The final step? Celebration. Sounds like he earned it :)
Thanks for the post Rob, it was really insightful!
And for Hard Writing readers, here's that video I mentioned earlier:
If you've got a finished manuscript and are ready to get it out to beta readers, please check out BetaBooks, it might be just what you're looking for!
Questions or comments? Feel free to email me: andrew[at]betabooks[dot]com.
