Ever think you need help with the entire writing and publishing process? Have you ever thought about taking an online course, but you don’t know where to start and they look too expensive? Here is some great news…

Dave Chesson — the owner-operator of Kindlepreneur — has put together a very nice summary (including the review ratings) of about 50 of the courses most relevant to writers, and better yet, they are all on sale for $9.99 until 28 August.

Even if you don’t get the news on the sale until after the 28th of August, Dave’s write-ups are still a fantastic resource to help you make sense of a lot of great Udemy content.

As always, I have no affiliate relationships. So there are no kickbacks for me on this. Rather, it looks like a good deal and Dave’s summaries are super helpful so thought I’d share to help you on your writing and self-publishing journey.

Head over to Kindlepreneur for all the details. Good luck!

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Yet again, I was party to a discussion about traditional publishing fiction vs. self-publishing fiction. The question was if self-published authors are any good? And yet again, the discussion had several flawed assumptions:

– If you are traditionally published you write well. If you write well you will be traditionally published.

– If you self-publish, you can’t write and you did a poor job of preparing your manuscript. People who self-publish do so because they are not good enough to traditionally publish.

As in most such discussions, there is some truth to all assumptions, but when the generalizations become gospel thoughtful discussion ends. So what is the truth of the matter?

First, by one count, 70% of traditionally published authors fail with their first book and are not offered a chance to publish a second. Said another way, 70% of the time the agents and publishers are wrong about a given book becoming successful.

Second, on the other hand, we all know the many, many stories of authors whose books became bestsellers but were rejected by scores of agents and publishers.

Third, sometimes agents and publishers may just be incompetent. Speaking from personal experience, a couple decades ago I sent a full manuscript unsolicited to a highly regarded medium-sized publisher of history books and asked them if they were interested. They were trying to get into fiction. My historical novel seemed like it would be a good fit. They responded to my manuscript a month later with contracts and advances for it and two more. Obviously, they loved it. We spent about a year editing it during which time they launched about 15 more novels, all of which failed. I eventually got a letter telling me they were exiting the fiction market. So was my novel really that brilliant or just another bad choice they had made because they did not know how to discern good from bad?

(To digress and finish this story… By the time they gave up on getting into fiction, I had an agent with JCA, and we submitted my novel to a few other houses and got a couple of near misses. The consensus seemed to be “Too violent for general literature and too literary for ‘men’s adventure'”.  Cormac McCarthy, where are you when I need you?)

Even though getting an agent only loosely correlates with being a competent writer, unless your writing is a debacle, getting an agent and subsequently a publisher is really a function of odds. And I very much believe that anyone who has sent a novel through a site such as CritiqueCircle.com for community review and feedback at least twice and has had it professionally copy edited is well positioned to get an agent, the qualifier being that the more unusual the work is the more agents you might have to engage to land one. 100 may not be near enough.

IMHO the only way we will know if our writing does not suck – no matter how we publish it — is if we get generally positive reviews (and at least 30 of them) once it is published. Whether or not it sells well and generates a lot of cash is another discussion altogether.

I’ve reviewed a number of self-published books. Some were good. Some were not so good. I’ve also started thousands of traditionally published books. Many I’ve stopped before I finished because they were very poor.

We can say that on average, traditionally published books are better than self-published books. Trying to generalize that into absolute truths is foolhardy and will result in flawed conclusions. And you’ll miss out on some great self-published books.

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Joanna Penn, an accomplished writer and blogger about writing and publishing has penned (pun intended ) a nice article about the pros and cons of indie publishing and traditional publishing.

Note that it is not indie versus traditional publishing. It is indie and traditional publishing. Neither is perfect, both have many challenges, and some writers might pick one over the other for one book, and the other for a subsequent book.

If you are trying to make up your mind about which way to go, take a look.  It’s a good article. Check it out. 

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Earlier today it had a sales rank of 50K (see the above screenshot). Sales have certainly declined from where they peaked about nine months after I published, but sales continue at a steady pace. And my novel is in a pretty small niche, so book sales have only so much upside in this niche.

My book is priced at $1.49, and it has been at that price for almost the entire time it has been for sale on Amazon, so I’m not wracking up sales by selling it at $.99.

Below you can see my Author Rank as tracked by Amazon. Even two and a half years after I launched my book it is still doing better than it did the month after I launched it. Again — see my blog on keywords. That dip the month after I published my book was because I did not know what I was doing (like most indies) with keywords. After that, I got my keywords figured out and my sales did much better.

I’m going to cut to the chase on why it continues to sell so well. There are three primary reasons, three things that anyone can do ramp their book sales and keep them up.

First and foremost: Optimize the keywords in your book title and subtitle (sign up to the right for my free guide on how to do it) — it is ridiculously easy to do and and a powerful tool

It is a simple concept. Words in your title and subtitle are “keywords” that help pull traffic to your book on Amazon. All the details on how to do it are in the free ebook. This is not hard stuff to do. It does take a few hours of work (research). But compared to how many hours you put into writing your book, this is nothing.

The second thing is you need lots of positive reviews

I have 63 on Amazon US (16 on Amazon UK, and 90 on Goodreads). More would be nice, but my reviews are all legit, and I’m a lot smarter about how I’m going to get more next time. To be clear, 63 is not a lot, but is a reasonable start for a first book. You need at least 50 to be in the game. I’ve also written about how to get more reviews for your book.

The third thing you have to do (after you learn how to write a book) is to create a well-written, well-edited, well-presented book

I ran my book through a number of beta readers, I hired a professional editor, I A/B tested my cover, and I spent a lot of time on my blurb. There were more little things, but these were the big ones.

The payoff? Still selling after two and half years — I’ve sold well more than 3,000 copies — and look below. My book is showing up beside some of the great fiction to come out of the Vietnam War.

Let me also show you the sales chart of a novel from a person I’ve met who was adamant that success in book sales was exclusively about the writing. He insisted that he was going to pay very little attention to anything else. I can’t speak to how well he writes, but I knew he was doomed from the start. Look at how his book has done. I believe he has sold fewer than 10 copies and sales are dropping like a rock. This is very typical for indie authors.

Forgive me for being blunt, but your book sales are going to suck if you don’t do these three things.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am spending about $.20 a day on advertising through AMS and Bing, which my sales more than cover. So my advertising absolutely helps, but it is a distant fourth to the three things I’ve detailed above.

These things are all easy to do

I’m not a rocket scientist or a book marketing expert, and some people will tell you I can’t write very well. But I know a few things about selling books. Let me summarize:

If your book does not show up in searches, few people will see your book.

If your book is not attractively presented, of the small number of people who stumble across your book, only a small percentage of them will actually buy it.

If few people buy your book, if it is not well edited, you will get very few reviews and what you will get will not be positive — the rule of thumb is that only 1 out of every 100 people who read your book will review it.

It’s your decision. You put a lot of heart, soul and time into your novel. It kills me to see people do that only to be distraught when their book’s sales are terrible. It does not have to be this way.

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