Pam Brossman

Thank you so much for having me and it’s a pleasure to be here.

So, where do you want me to begin? Do you want me to begin with a couple of strategies or why business owners or coaches and consultants should publish a book on Amazon and they should be leveraging the power of Amazon?

Pam Brossman

Okay.

Pam Brossman

Okay, well, there are 2 ways of doing it. Now, depends on your target market and what you want to do with the book.

If you are an online business owner which a lot of entrepreneurs are, then you’re probably going to leverage Kindle and the digital book of which you can put lots of links throughout your book. Now, be warned that even though lots of people say you can, you’re not allowed, as it’s against Amazon’s terms and conditions, to sell from your Kindle book.

To publish a book on Amazon, you can strategically put links at the beginning of your book and throughout the chapters of your book that send people back to existing business or product funnels that you have created for which if that was the purpose why you created your book.

Everybody creates their book for a different purpose. If you publish a book on Amazon, it’s important to have some end goals and to know what you want to do with the book.

Pam Brossman

But if you’ve already went through the process to publish a book on Amazon, that’s okay too, because with it being digital, you can re-upload it over and over again and change the links relevant to what you’re trying to achieve or your objective for that book. So that’s one of the main things that you can do from a digital book.

Pam Brossman

This is why I love to teach people how to publish a book on Amazon. It gives you so much freedom to grow, change, and tweak things.

From a physical book, it’s more about the thumb factor and using that book to cross promote, to position your knowledge and expertise, and taking that book everywhere.

Let’s say, when you’re doing a bid and tender if you’re a consultant and you’re trying to get some work with a corporate, sending that book with your suggestion to them or with your meeting, sending it prior to the meeting.

Pam Brossman

My husband is a high-level coaching consultant and he gets business straight away. This is the power when you publish a book on Amazon. He gets people wanting to see him earlier, purely by just sending his book in there prior or sending them the digital version and saying, “Please read chapters 2 and 3 before we get to the meeting and I’ll show you how we’re going to use that,” to benefit whatever it is he’s trying to help that person in that consulting job. So those are a couple of ways that you can use the power when you publish a book on Amazon, you can do this straight away.

Pam Brossman

Okay, well, so here’s an example, too. I know a lot of consultants and coaches, they’re busy and they get a lot of phone calls and inquiries from people who end up not being their exact target market or not the right person. And that takes a lot of their valuable time.

Pam Brossman

What my husband did with the same flow is this. With the digital version of his book, he has people go through a process where they go and opt-in on his website and from there and throughout the book, he sends them to video training tutorials based on the concepts that he’s sharing in his book.

His book is called Stand Up, Stand Out, or Stand Aside. So it’s about positioning your expertise. They go and watch those training tutorials and at the bottom of that he sends them to a questionnaire where they can go through that questionnaire and then book in a call with him. He says that if they’re prepared to not only read his book, opt in, watch the video training, go through the questionnaire and book in that call, they are highly, highly targeted hot lead, saves him a huge amount of time and he won’t speak to people until they’ve gone through that process and then he converts 99% of those people on that call.

Pam Brossman

Yeah. Madness, madness.

Pam Brossman

Well, listen. This is the truth there. I’m not writing these books because I love to write. I mean, for seriousness, I’ve failed English. Writing is not my passion. I did this for the marketing and leverage power plus the impact.

Every book I do is strategic. Every time I publish a book on Amazon, I have a clear business purpose. So if I’m going to be running a course or creating a new program, then what I’ll do is that I know that there are seven steps to this system. So I’ve got a book, Self Publish: How to Write A Book in 10 Super Easy Steps.

Pam Brossman

Now that is a system that I’ve gone through to publish a book on Amazon and built a course on, so each of my chapter topics are specific to what to do but not how to do it. And then throughout those chapters I will have links that will send them back into that product funnel.

Pam Brossman

So the reason why I keep on writing more books is because it’s in relation to something that I may be launching or a program or to position my knowledge and expertise in an area that I want to be positioned as the leading expert, and that’s a great way for you to be writing books. This is how I teach and know is the best way to publish a book on Amazon.

Now they’ve got this new thing that’s come out, that is hugely, hugely popular at the moment and it’s called short reads. This is another method and way for people to publish a book on Amazon. Because people hate writing, you know? That they’re time-poor—the people that are on this podcast, they’re time-poor. I know that. I understand that.

Now you can repurpose content like a webinar or a podcast like this and create short reads books and make them digital or you can make them print on demand, and each one of those go deep on one topic that you want to be known as an area or an expert in and that book specifically takes people to where you want them to go. So that is another strategy that I’m going to be implementing a lot of in 2016, where you do shorter books instead of one big book and have lots of them.

Pam Brossman

Because you got to remember when you publish a book on Amazon, Google loves Amazon. You get lots of SEO traffic, not only from Amazon but also from being crawled on Google. So when you want, as a consultant, for someone to go and type in your name on the search engines, you want your expertise status as an author to be popping up everywhere. When you publish a book on Amazon, it’s a huge positioning strategy.

Pam Brossman

Well, that goes back to the purpose and payoff. This something that a lot of people don’t do and they make a lot of mistakes. They write a book on a topic that they want to write about, publish it on Amazon, when instead they should be writing and publish a book on Amazon because their audience wants it, because there is a demand. Now we’re talking specifically non-fiction books here.

Pam Brossman

At the very beginning, you should know who your reader is and what is the immediate outcome or win that that reader wants right now in their life, and that’s what you should be writing your book about.

Then you want to focus on what the payoff is. What do you want that book to do? Because when you know what your purpose is, the quick win that your reader wants, and the payoff of how you’re going to be the solution to whatever they want to achieve from reading that book, then you know how to write the book and what to thread throughout the book, like cheat sheets or videos or what opt-in page you’re going to have.

People just write a book, and stick it up there and then they wonder why it doesn’t sell. It’s because they’re just writing a book on what they want to write about. That’s a big mistake.

If you’re doing a book for leverage, for business and for positioning, then you have to do it based on a pain, want, need, desire, or aspiration that a group of people want. If you’re doing it for business, then that has to be a big enough group.

Pam Brossman

The other key point you need to do is people don’t use keywords. They try and get clever with their book titles. If you have a humongous following and list, you can call your book whatever you want.

Gary Vaynerchuk called his book, Crush It!. Crush it means nothing in the realm of what you’re looking for as an outcome. But everybody knows Gary Vaynerchuk and everybody loves Gary Vaynerchuk, so he’s going to make it a bestseller or a New York Times bestseller no matter what.

But if you’re not recognized for a specific area of expertise and you want to be, then your main keyword must be the title of your book. This right here, is a key and very smart if you’re going to publish a book on Amazon. So you’d have podcasting in there, podcast, self-publishing. Use those in your main title because Google cannot read the subtitle and a lot of people put their keywords in the subtitle. That’s a big mistake. So that’s another key tip.

Pam Brossman

If you’re doing it for positioning then the price point obviously is between $2.99 and $9.99. You have to stay between that range to get 70% of the commission. That is the sweet spot when you publish a book on Amazon that you know will sell.

If you’re an expert and you want to be positioned as an expert and pricing is more important to you than selling books on Amazon, then you’ll keep it up near the $9.99 mark. If you don’t care about the commissions at all, then you can price it anywhere up to about $14. Most of them are books at the higher end of the spectrum, but they’re usually business books.

If you’re doing it because you want to use it as a lead generator and you don’t care about the pocket money you get for commission, then stick between the $2.99 and $3.99 price point. They’re the price points where people don’t hesitate. They just click the Buy Now button.

Pam Brossman

I have another question about the steps to publish a book on Amazon, what about putting your book up as a Kindle Unlimited? I see a lot of people doing that. I personally have checked out a lot of books that way. I noticed you have quite a variety of books available on Kindle Unlimited. What is it about that?

Pam Brossman

Okay, Kindle Unlimited is rolling out per country and it is a very smart for you if you’re using your book for lead generation because people can borrow as many books as they like in a month. And it is the way that books are going in the future.

It’s going to be very hard for authors to make a lot of money with this new membership model but for those people like me who haven’t gone through the steps to publish a book on Amazon and to make money from being an author, I’m making money from the positioning that being a bestseller gives me. The more exposure I get from being put in the Unlimited, the better.

So it depends at once again on your purpose and pay off. If you’re a full-time author, it’s going to hurt you because you’re not getting that much money on commission. But if you’re not doing it for full-time income as an author, then definitely without a doubt go in it. And write as many short books, one-hour books as you can.

Pam Brossman

Yes.

Pam Brossman

Oh, yes. I’m totally talking about Kindle.

Pam Brossman

To be honest with you, I have three print books. I only use print books for thumb factor. This is another aspect of being strategic when you publish a book on Amazon.

If I strategically do a lot of speaking from stage and workshops, then I print the ones that are best suited for that space. Everything else to me is just digital.

In Australia, it’s a different pricing structure here where people pay more for books here. So it’s anywhere between $19.99 which is what I charge for mine which is 150 pages print book and the print costs for that are about $3.99 to $4.99 or anywhere up to $29. It’s probably the maximum most people pay for books here in Australia.

For you, over the States, most people charge about $14.99 for print books, anywhere from 150 to 250 pages.

Pam Brossman

Okay, here’s a couple of ones. I was writing about this only the other day in my brand-new book coming out.

Pam Brossman

One of the great ways you can do it is if you go to networking events, you can offer your book up as a door prize because at networking events, there are always door prices. And by volunteering your book for some of the door prizes, that gets your book in front of the person who’s hosting the event and then let them know that if they’re ever looking for a speaker on this topic, you’d be more than happy to help out.

Straight away if it’s a bestseller book, they see the icon. This is what’s happening with all my authors. My authors come to me to get the bestseller purely for opening doors for them.

Another one is you’ve got your media buyer that you send out to the speaker bureaus, send it with your book. There’s not a lot of speakers out there in the market who have a bestselling book. So out of all those one pages that people are sending in there, you’re gonna have that thumb factor when they get the lumping mail.

The people want to promote people who are bestsellers, the same if you want to get in the paid corporate speaking. Don’t send it out to the CEOs. Get the names of the executive assistants or the personal assistants of these businesses that you want to go and speak in because they are the gatekeepers and they are the people who go and pick the speakers for these events. Go and send it to them because people do not throw books away. They’ll throw your cheat sheet or one-page media profile buyer away. But they’ll never throw your book away.

Pam Brossman

That’s exactly a crime. You just won’t do it and people put it on the desk and then someone will walk past and see it.

Pam Brossman

That icon just jumps out at people and the same thing, too, when you go to other people’s events, always have your book. My husband did this when we went to a friend of ours’ speaking event, and he just has his book sitting on the table.

The biggest mistake most people do is they put their book in their bag. Don’t do that. Either walk around the room with your book facing outwards especially if your face is on the cover of your book and every person listening here, if you are your brand, your face must be on the front cover.

And then you walk around the room with that cover facing outwards with the bestseller icon, you say nothing. You’ll be amazed at how many people approach you and say, “Are you an author? Wow!” And then put that book down on the table because what happens is people come and speak to you and then they’ll say, “Oh, we’re running an event. Would you come and speak at our event?”

You just have to let it be known that you’re a bestselling author and put it on all your marketing material. It is everywhere. It’s on my LinkedIn profile, my Facebook profile, on the bottom of my signature. It is on everything that I am a 10 times No. 1 bestselling author and that opens up many doors for me, hands down. This piece is just another piece and a great way to leverage when you publish a book on Amazon and the other places where you can become a best selling author.

Yesterday, did a Source Bottle call out to go into a magazine article for a question on being successful. How can one be more successful as entrepreneurs? I went and said, “Oh, just writing a brand new book on this exact topic.” Put an excerpt out. Within 24 hours, I got the gig going out to 30,000 subscribers who are my exact target market.

Pam Brossman

Absolutely!

Pam Brossman

That’s what I did. I‘ll give you another thing that I did. I launched my book and I mentioned a lot of my entrepreneurs.

Here’s another tip. Always try and get a celebrity foreword if you can. Try and get a celebrity foreword or here’s what I did when I did SheExperts and made it a bestseller which was very smart and I did it strategically.

What I did was I was showing eight different ways that people were making a million dollars using different strategies and I did case studies on different entrepreneurs that I knew that were making million dollars from their expertise.

So I made the case study all about them and how amazing they were and gave examples of what they were doing. And then I approached each one of those millionaires and said, “Look, I’m done writing my book. I’m just sharing the amazing case study on you and how amazing you are at what you’re doing. Do you mind giving me a testimonial or just writing a short excerpt in the book?” And they all said yes. Every one of these multi-millionaires went and did a testimonial in my book.

When I launched the book, I went and said, “Thank you,” at Ali Brown.  “Thank you, Lewis Howes.” Thank you to all these different people and guess what that allowed me to do? Promote my book on their fan page.

Pam Brossman

That’s another quick tip to go out there. You obviously have to ask permission, but it was nothing promoting me. I just did one chapter. The rest of it was about them.

Pam Brossman

No. I did in the beginning.

I’ll be honest with you. When I launched my first book that’s how I did it, but then I felt like, you know, I re-launched it again at a paid price because I didn’t feel like it was getting a bestseller. I know there’s bestsellers in both Free and Paid category but do you honestly feel like you’ve got a bestseller when you gave your book away?

Pam Brossman

No, you didn’t.

The reason why people use the free strategy back then was that when you came off that 5-day Free, it used to send you to the top in the Paid, and then you could stay there. So there was a strategy behind doing it. But then Amazon changed the algorithms. That method when you publish a book on Amazon is no longer something you can use.

Pam Brossman

So now, I don’t even do the free launches anymore, unless I just need to give my book a boost. The Free plug, as soon as your 5-day Free or 3-day Frees are over, you go back into nowhere on the Paid stream. I would rather do a launch and get there on the Paid stream and ride the Paid books. It’s because the other thing you have to realize that when people download these free books, the chances they ever read that book are pretty slim.

Pam Brossman

So if you’re doing that for lead generation, that person might read your book in 2 years’ time. “Oh, yeah. I remember. I downloaded that book.” How many of you have downloaded a lot of free books and then never read them?

The reason why people use the free strategy back then was that when you came off that 5-day Free, it used to send you to the top in the Paid, and then you could stay there. So there was a strategy behind doing it. But then Amazon changed the algorithms. That method when you publish a book on Amazon is no longer something you can use.

Pam Brossman

Yeah, well, there you go. Whereas if someone pays, you’ve changed them into a buyer.

Pam Brossman

It’s almost your trip wire.

Pam Brossman

That they talk about, you turn them from a freebie to a buyer, because if those people are only going to be freebie seekers and only download books off that freebie list, chances of you selling to them are pretty slim.

Pam Brossman

That’s right, they’re free posts and you have to pay these days. It’s cost you a lot of money to have big lists these days.

Pam Brossman

Yup.

Pam Brossman

Well, that’s my secret sauce and that’s what I share in my courses. But I’ll give you a quick tip. It’s got to do with volume. It’s all volume-based.

Pam Brossman

Okay, alright. As I said, it’s volume-based and based on category.

I’ve got over 60 No. 1. I just launched another one—over 60 bestselling authors that have been through my program. And the reason why it works is because I study this daily.

Pam Brossman

The thing you have to understand is Amazon changes its algorithms all the time. One minute it’ll be based on how many reviews you’ve got, and then next minute it’ll be on how many sales you’ve got. So you have to know what you’re doing.

Here’s a quick thing. If you go in the wrong category, you’re screwed.

So it’s category and volume because here’s another thing when you publish a book on Amazon, Amazon’s results changes every hour. And you also have to watch when you become a bestseller, because there are people who make a living as an author when they publish a book on Amazon. They put out 30 or 40 books a month. They do it for a living. They do not want you to be on that No. 1 spot, and if you are in a highly targeted category, then you’re going to get knocked off in about 10 minutes because when you get 1, 2, and 3 spot in that category, you’re making money.

Now here’s another thing. Not all categories are created equal. That’s why you have to have a strategy when you publish a book on Amazon. When it comes to being strategic when you publish a book on Amazon, you have to know this stuff. Not all Amazon categories are created equal.

Pam Brossman

What’s that?

Pam Brossman

Well, they are not. I’ve got a guy who went through the process to publish a book on Amazon and is selling his eBook off his website for $29. It’s just a normal eBook and it’s all about having a nice lawn. He comes to me and he’s bought my course.

He said, “Pam, I want that No. 1 Bestseller for my book.” And he said, “Do you think I can get it?” And I said, “The chances of you getting it are pretty high. The chances of you ever making any money from it are pretty slim.” I said, “Because I can tell you right now that people are not going to Amazon to learn how to make a nice lawn.”

So just because there’s a category on Amazon, it doesn’t mean that that category is making money when you publish a book on Amazon.

Pam Brossman

Yes. That’s why I have gray hair.

When my people are launching, I do not sleep. You ask my husband. I get very passionate, which is why I’ve got 100% success rate. When my people are launching, I don’t let them fail.

When you publish a book on Amazon, there are many mistakes that people can make. If I see something going wrong because I’ve lived them all, I’ve lived every mistake through all my launches, then I’ll step in. And that’s what people pay me for. They pay me to learn that I do this in my sleep.

I look and think, “Oh, gosh, they’ve changed this. This isn’t working. Quick, Pam. What are you going to do?” And I’ll go in there and I’ll figure it out so that they get it. Because it’s a system. It’s like everything else. Getting to page one of Google is a system. Getting the New York Times Bestseller is a system. Publish a book on Amazon and getting to number one on Amazon is a system. Once you know it, you can repeat it.