Pimping Indie Guide

By Laurie Pailes-Lindeman

Overview:

If you want to earn a living as a professional independent writer, you have to start viewing writing for money as a PROFESSION not a HOBBY. Accordingly, you have to be both systematic and methodical in promoting YOURSELF as a BRAND.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twin Cadeuces
• Release date: Jun 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781533745477

Laurie Pailes-Lindeman

Loves to write in her neck of the woods in NH. Mother and wife and lover her fur babies of three dogs. Reads about 3 books daily and loves finding the next great read. Best time for her is having her toes in the sand and a book in her hand

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission from the author, except in the case of excerpts or quotations embodied in reviews.

Editing By

Jessica Bolduc and Marilyn Ortega

Proofreading By

Jessica Bolduc, Marilyn Ortega

Introduction

If you're serious about earning a living as a writer, you need to build an author platform. There are no two ways about it: the Internet is filled with the carcasses of the dreams of would-be writers and wannabe publishing millionaires.

These people started out really excited about the prospect of writing books and publishing them on the Amazon Kindle marketplace. They read all sorts of stories of housewives who became overnight millionaires because of a book they published.

These writers then put in the time, effort, and energy to put together a great book. They polished the book. They spent a lot of time editing it and getting feedback from friends and family. They looked for the best cover.

Once everything is perfect, they uploaded it to their Amazon account and published it on the Amazon Kindle marketplace, and then they waited and waited, and waited.

Nothing happened. No sales. Absolutely no love from the Internet.

What went wrong?

These authors committed the most common mistake that rookie writers make: they published and they prayed.

I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but the publish and pray strategy doesn't work. In fact, it's not even a strategy.

If you want to earn a living as a professional independent writer, you have to start viewing writing for money as a profession, not a hobby. Accordingly, you have to be both systematic and methodical in promoting yourself as a brand.

This is where lots of writers get it wrong. Most don't even think of book promotions. The ones that do think they have to promote their book specifically.

Wrong.

The right answer? You have to promote yourself as the author. Promote yourself as a brand.

Once you get a fan base going, then you would have a steady base of people who would almost instinctively buy your book the moment you publish them online. This is how the game works. Sadly, most people are clueless to this. This is the reason why the vast majority of the books on Amazon Kindle are simply lying there. They're not selling. They're just filling up digital space.

If you want to be a successful indie writer, you need to pimp yourself right. You need to build a powerful author platform.

An author platform is simply your brand. It tells people what to expect. It projects a certain level of authority and credibility. If you do this right, people will seek you out and not the other way around.

This book steps you through the process of putting together a powerful author platform without burning a hole through your pocket. You see, most people don’t have the luxury of investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a book marketing campaign. In fact, if you're situation is anywhere similar to that of a typical writer, you don’t have much money to work with. That’s perfectly OK. With the right plan, building a solid author platform doesn’t have to take much cash.

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Chapter 1

Nobody's buying my book: The agony and the ecstasy of self-publishing

As I've mentioned previously, people just publish and pray. They think that the inherent and innate awesomeness of their book should be enough to carry it through.

Sorry, but this is wishful thinking.

You only need to take a quick look at the best sellers in many of the niches on Amazon Kindle to know that this is not true. In many cases, the number of copies a book sells and the quality of that book are completely unrelated. There are many books that are well-written, highly-polished, and packed with substance that are just gathering digital dust. Nobody's buying them.

It doesn't take long for you to check out the top sellers almost in any niche on Amazon Kindle and see that for the most part a lot of the best sellers are not high-quality books.

What's going on?

Very simple, it's all about marketing.

You see, in the marketplace, there is really no such thing as real value. It all boils down to the perceived value your target audience members have of whatever it is that you're selling. If they think what you're pushing has value, guess what? It has value.

If you put in a lot of work producing a product and you think that it is the best product in the world, none of that matters if your target audience members think otherwise. It's all about perceived value. I start this book on author platform building with this key point. You need to wrap your mind around this point, otherwise you're not going to make much progress with this book.

You have to focus on perceived value. Perception, as far as book marketing is concerned, is reality. Sure, we can differ regarding philosophical absolutes. But philosophical absolutes are not going to put food on your table, perceived value will. Understand that this is the bedrock of effective author marketing.

Self-publishing versus traditional publishing

Traditional publishing is great for authors if you make it through the editorial filtering process. You see, traditional publishing houses only take a tiny fraction of the manuscripts submitted to them every single year. The reason for this is quite simple.

Once a publishing house takes a manuscript and decides to invest in it, they would put together a publishing team, a public relations strategy, and instantly the published author benefits from all these resources. Best of all, the published author is being pushed by an experienced and