Welcome to today’s GSDdaily episode 129, and it is Thursday and our Expand day. What we’re going to talk about is using a book to get continuity clients, using a body of work to expand your continuity client base, to grow awareness for your brand. If you talk to any author, any editor, any publisher, and whatever, they’re going to say, a book is going to get you on more stages. A book is going to raise your perceived value, help grow your brand, help you command more money from the clients that you have, and also help endear you to more prospects so that you can command more money.
Now, all of that is true, but it’s a lot less vital to get started. A couple of weeks ago, we did the Playbook Five Day Series, and what we did was we turned it around. We turned it in into its 54-page playbook that is published or is being published through Amazon. So we’re going to walk through some of that process, but I want to show you how easy it is to collect your work, to take what you’ve already written, or to create something new that can be turned into a book or paperback, a textbook or whatever that you can use to get continuity clients. Now, here’s kind of a big example.
Funnel Factor
This book, Funnel Factor, is a 274-page book that I wrote none of new. This is a collection of a bunch of blog posts and a bunch of material that is on Done For You right now. It was a report that was about 19 pages and I just kind of went to hell with the joke. I ended up saying, I got to redo Funnel Factor because it’s been three or four years since I did it. Then I was bored one weekend. I think it was snowing outside or whatever. I started playing with this new piece of software. This piece of software that I found was Scrivener.
Publish Your Own Book
1. Ebooks Created on Scrivener
Scrivener is a literature software. It’s an authoring software, an authoring tool. And what it lets you do is you can download a free trial here, but it’s your collection of all of your authored works. It might be blog posts, might be emailed. What happens is when you write a lot, and I have 14 years’ worth of blog posts in writing that I’ve done. When you write a lot and you have a lot of collected material, then you have a lot of, there’s a lot of power there to get continuity clients. There’s no reason why you should need to write new, write from scratch every time. So what this software lets you do is you basically put things together into workbooks and then the workbook is like a blog post and you can drag stuff around from point to point.
This is the software here which’s called Scrivener. I have Scrivener projects now for all of my email copy, for all my blog posts, for all my books, for all my sales copy. So I rarely write anything new. I kind of rehash something that I wrote a while ago and I might just edit it to kind of bring it up to the times or whatever. And that’s exactly what I did with this book. So I just went through, I imported the old, the Funnel Factor into Scrivener, and then I just started dropping new blog posts all along the way. So like, if we look at the table of contents, so here, like micro-actions, you probably can’t see it.
Micro-Actions
Micro-actions, the simple guide to creating customer avatar. The best converting sales funnels. Building this… All of this stuff was just material that I already had on the blog. I already wrote it. So I just put it into a book form and Scrivener made it easy. Then once they exported that book, I went in and I set it up in Amazon. So I set it up as a PDF. I gave it away for free for a couple of months or whatever to get continuity clients. Now it’s 1995 on the site and on Amazon, it’s 2995 for the Kindle version, or you can download it for free as part of the Kindle Unlimited program. Then also this textbook is 100 bucks that’s shipped and printed right from Amazon there.
Setting it up inside, and I fully don’t expect that somebody is going to pay 100 dollars for the paperback, although it is a great deal at that, just because of all the knowledge and stuff. But I have now received pictures of people printing this thing out and then binding it. So they’re sending me a text… One of them was, “I bet you nobody else printed your book out and bound it.” I’m like, “Actually, I did just see, I just got an email the other day. Somebody did the same thing.” Which is awesome. But this book because it’s full color, it costs close to $30 just to print, print and mail. We can do black and white. But anyway, so that’s all besides the point.
2. Ebooks Published on Kindle
Now, if we go into kdp.amazon.com, which is Kindle Direct Publishing, this is your clearinghouse for all of your book stuff. So you can see that basically, I have five books, so we’re putting together the Automated Webinar playbook. The paperback is actually in review right now. So it’s going to be the same size as this, it’s eight and a half by 11. But because it’s only 54 pages long, it’s only going to be 10 bucks, which I’m excited about that. It’s going to be fun. Then we got Funnel Factor here, and then we have my last books, Create, Convert, and Phoenix Formula. So let’s just go in here to Create, I just want to show you the setup.
1. Editing Ebook Details
For the Kindle book itself, we’re going to go into, we’re just going to edit the ebook details. And I’m doing this to show you that it’s a whole hell of a lot easier to expand your presence with a book to get continuity clients and get in front of more people than not. We set our language, we set the book title, and then we give the series. If this is a series, for instance, the playbook is a playbook series. I called it playbook series and then series number one because it’s the Automated Webinar playbook. The next one we do are going to be an application playbook. So Application Funnel playbook. Edition number one, author, description, publishing rights. So if it’s a public domain work, then you’re required to hit this little checkbox.
And if it’s not, then I own the copyright. Then you have your keywords, which don’t matter a whole lot. They do matter because it’s an Amazon listing, but the Amazon listing isn’t going to show up for online businesses or products. Your Amazon listing is going to show up for your author profile. So if somebody Googles your name, your Amazon author profile is going to come up before any of these other keyword phrases, which is great from a branding standpoint. Then we have our categories and we have our age and grade range. And then we have pre-order if you want to do a pre-order. So I didn’t for this one, but you could do it if you wanted.
2. Uploading Ebook File
The next step is after you fill in all the logistics, the next step is the actual ebook content itself. So like I said, you can write an ebook inside Scrivener and export it as an epub file. I like writing stuff in Word or Google, not Google, but yeah, even Google Docs, you can write it in. And then you use Kindle Create to turn it into like an epub file, a file that is good for Kindle. So Kindle Create is a free download. It has light editing functionality. You can set up tables of contents and all that other stuff in there. Let’s see. And then you just upload the manuscript. So you see that KPF, that’s how I did this. So I uploaded a KPF file, which is Kindle publishing format, and then also ran spell check on it because I’m not all that great with spelling sometimes.
Then I uploaded the cover file. So this is just a JPEG or a TIFF file. I think this is just a JPEG file. And then you preview it. So you can open up the preview, I’m not going to open it up. And actually, I think I can actually. Let me see if I can open this up and it doesn’t like reset everything. That would kind of suck. Let’s see here. So it’s opening up. We’re preparing the book to… Okay, here we go. So this is our preview file for the Kindle book. The published book is full like, you see the fully open, like a book is open and you have to verify the placement on all of them to get continuity clients. But this is what the Create book is going to look like on a Kindle device.
3. Assigning ISBN
So it looks good. Everything is all, it works. So let’s see, I’m going to close this out. There we go. Then we have our ebook ISBN. Kindle will assign an ISBN to you if you want. I have a block of 10 ISBNs, ISBNs that I purchased a long, long time ago at Bowker, bowker.com, which is the ISBN clearinghouse. So if you are an author, you can purchase ISBN barcodes. The ISBN codes. One is expensive. Identify your services. Let’s look at this. I forget exactly… Yeah. Order an ISBN, let’s see how much it is. Okay. One ISBN is $125. 10 ISBNs are $295. That’s the pack that I bought like four or five years ago. And then 100 ISBNs is 575. And 1,000 ISBNs is $1,500.
So if you have one book in you, I would say you probably have multiple books in you. So at least grab that 10 ISBN pack. It’s not that much more. Then once you get that ISBN, what you do is you go back here and you assign your ISBN here, and then you have the publisher. So the publisher is my company. Then we move to the next phase. So we talk about Kindle ebook pricing. So ebook pricing, some people say there’s a magic to this. Yes and no. Kindle eBooks usually try to be like 13, $14. The paperback, you can be $19. You can be nine or 10 bucks for the Kindle book. Like on these kinds of books, I try to make sure it’s on Kindle Unlimited.
Importance of Having Own Book
It’s more essential for you when you have to get continuity clients, to just have people become aware of you. If you can add value through a shared platform like Kindle, Amazon is the most trusted brand in the world. Having a book on Amazon, then some of that shared brand loyalty is going to rub off on you. It makes sense for them to read your book on Kindle for free. That’s up to you. You could charge a couple of bucks. You can charge 10 bucks, you can charge 15. It just really depends on what you want to do. What kind of perceived value you want to uphold. What your purpose behind the book is.
This particular one may have 1495 in there. And I also have allowed lending for this book. So somebody can check it out, read it, check it back in. I love my Kindle Unlimited subscription. I use it all the time. So that’s why we have it here. That’s about it though. So this is how you can expand your presence. You can reach outside of just your ecosystem. You can reach into Amazon and start generating some goodwill, generate some awareness, generating some cash flow and some prospects, and some clients from a different ecosystem to get continuity clients. So with that, I am going to… Let’s see. Cool.
Jay Conner says, oh, nice, Jay. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. So thank you, Jay. I appreciate it.
For Questions and Guide
If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little application and we will get you taken care of. And if you need anything at all, just let me know.
