You Need to Have a Good System if You Want to be a #1 Bestselling Author
Otherwise, you will never make it happen or be able to repeat the process
I have three #1 Bestselling books on Amazon. In total, I have over 6,000 copies downloaded and sold. Prior to this last year, I had no #1 Bestsellers and less than 1,000 downloads and sales.
What I learned in 2021, was how important it is to have a system for your writing, book publishing, and marketing efforts. Once you have that system in place, well, the sky is the limit.
What does your writing system look like right now?
If you are just starting out, you might not have much of a system to date. You may simply be writing in a word processor, or notes app on your computer. Heck, you might simply be writing directly into a platform editor.
However, if you have been at this for a while, you might have a general system like the three bucket system for writing posts, and haven’t created much for writing books. If you haven’t self published a book yet, this might be why.
Your system for writing books matters.
Over the last few years, I have dialed in my system for writing books. It has take years to finally figure out out, but it has helped take me from nobody with no books to someone who has three #1 bestsellers and thousands of downloads.
Today, I want to share with you the basics on how I do it. Now, you might have seen this before. I share this basic system fairly regularly, but I want to keep it at the front of your mind.
Life gets busy, things get hard, and we must learn to adapt. All that to say, when we can keep our systems in the front of our mind, we can adapt more easily to change and actually do the things we want to do in life.
9 Step System to Self-Publishing
This is a quick guide to self-publishing. If you want to go into more depth, I will encourage you to read this post on my blog. Both of them of into great depth on self-publishing. Here are your nine steps:
Plan Your Book. You need to pick your topic, outline your book, and make a few decisions. It would help if you decided how long you want your text to be, who your audience is, and how long you want your project to take from start to finish.
Write Your Book. You can start by writing your book in a series of blog posts. Or write it as one independent document in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. I have done both, but I like getting feedback with blog posts.
Edit Your Book. You need an independent editor to help you edit your book. You can find someone on Fiverr, writing groups, or simply Googling editors. This person should be the person that enables you to make your book great.
Design Your Book Cover. This is another place where I highly suggest you hire out for this task. Having an excellent cover will help you sell books. Unless you do design already, I don't recommend you do this yourself.
Format Your Book. Once your manuscript is ready to be uploaded to create your book, you need to format it into digital and print formats. You can learn to do this yourself, hire out, or find programs that make it easy. I can do it for you if you want me to format your book because I love it.
Publish Your Book. When publishing your book, you need to decide on pricing, pick excellent categories and keywords, and write a solid book description. For choosing categories and keywords, check this resource out.
**Distribute Your Book.**Where do you want to publish it? I suggest these three places as they are the ones I use: Amazon KDP, ACX, and Smashwords. This helps get your book out into the world.
Launch Your Book. There are three main ways I promote my books. This is how I became a #1 Bestseller with three of them. So far, I am three for three on bestseller status when I do these things.
I focus on a launch day FREE promotion, build a launch team and pay for email list promotions.
Promote Your Book. This step is separate because your ongoing promotion is what makes your book great.
I do this with email sequences, mentioning my book often, and I do quarterly promotions. This keeps engagement and sales alive.
That is it. These are the nine steps you need to go from idea to self-published author. And potentially a #1 Bestselling author. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out!
The Beginning of Your Self-Publishing Journey
The time has never been better to become a self-published author. In fact, I think that anyone should start working on their self-published book now. Because of this, I am building some resources to help writers become authors.
If you are interested in learning more about self-publishing, please reach out via the comments below or emailing me at jack@jrheimbigner.com. I would love to share what I am working on and how you can be part of the initial resource lineup.
Outside of that, start writing today!
J.R. Heimbigner is a #1 Bestselling Author on Amazon who loves helping people grow in their faith and help writers become authors. You can connect with him on Medium, his website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Substack!
If you like this newsletter, check out my free and paid offerings on Gumroad!