Nick Loper titled his webinar "Side Hustling with E-books (the marketing lessons I learned from launching 6 e-books)".
When he started with just having a blog on outsourcing, he wanted to build some authority, so he wrote a book on virtual assistants. Very few sales through his site [my problem too, at this point] and low revenue from Amazon [I haven't published on Amazon yet]. Part of the impact and boost in authority came from the content and being referenced and quoted in other sites.
He wrote a second book on treadmill desks, probably a first on this topic. It was a short book, but he included some case studies from other offices who had treadmill desks. The mentions in the book gave it a bit of a built-in virality that helped at the launch.
[Regarding pricing, I had my own problems figuring out what price to charge for my pronunciation e-dictionary. You see, in my country, Portugal, more expensive usually sells better. People think if it's cheaper, it's crap. I believe I ended up at an in-between reasonable price.]
He ended up hiring a ghost writer to write the first thousand words of his third book about how to improve your website. He got back something he wouldn't feel ok signing his name to, so he started from scratch. [Here's something I'd never consider doing: having a ghost writer. Either "I" do it myself or I don't, and nobody else does it for me. BTW, I love writing.]
His fourth book is the result of what I consider to be a very cool idea. Nick had been studying self-publishing for a year and used to listen to the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast. It always ended with the question: "Do you have an Internet resource that you love?" That led him to think that he could compile information from 500 podcasts and write a blog post about it. And he did. But the kept getting bigger and bigger, so he contacted the podcast people. His blog post turned into a book project. He had some 500 companies and about 300 entrepreneurs that he could reach and say: "You were featured in this book or you were cited as a contributor to this book...". They could help the book go viral through their contacts. And Nick had a few hundred contacts of his own. He sent out an email and got about five thousand clicks in the first week. It was free for the first week and made it to #17 in the overall Kindle store and to #1 in non-fiction.
Other marketing strategies he used: he submitted the book to all Kindle free promo sites, targeted LinkedIn and FB groups and did some guest posts, which didn't help much. His email list grew by 50%.
For his fifth book he interviewed Nick Stephenson [who also gave a webinar at this Summit that I didn't attend, but I will be talking about the interview that Nick gave to Joanna Penn in an upcoming blog post]. NickS suggested that NickL repurpose content from his podcasts and write a series of short books. The Side Hustle Path came about and he's currently working on vol. 3). BTW, vol. 2 is permafree on Amazon. He launched it mainly through his email list and on FB.
Lesson he learned over the past 2.5-3 years of self-publishing: he's constantly trying to build his brand and customer database.
Final takeaway on the marketing side: get Amazon to notice you. And keep writing and launching books. It's an ongoing practice.
Thanks, Nick, for a very authentic talk and for showing that writers can grow gradually, but with constant work and persistence.