Guerrilla Publishing Techniques for Indie Authors

Although I’ve been talking about book marketing for almost a decade, I mostly used nonfiction books to build my client-based business. I need my books to be visible enough to generate new leads, but I didn’t need them to produce real income.

That’s changing this year, as I’m not focused on becoming a full-time writer. Which means, my books need to earn enough money to live on.

I’m doing that in two ways: first, I want to make sure my books are part of a funnel or series, so I can make the first one free or cheap, get a lot of followers on Amazon and subscribers on my email list (I have 25,000 subscribers on my list after less than a year), and launch my books well enough they stick (which means, at least 1000 sales on launch).

But especially for non-fiction, I also want my books to be loss-leaders leading towards more expensive products, in my case, online courses. I launched my first online course earlier this year and it sold out in 48 hours. Now I’m building some courses I can make an “evergreen” part of my funnel, and hopefully sell on autopilot, as long as I can keep a steady flow of traffic. In that regard, I’m experimenting with free and paid companion workbooks for each course, and also giving away beta-access to the courses when people buy and review the books during launch.

Although The 21 Day Bestselling Author Platform will be my major new course, I’m first launching this shorter, tighter one on Guerrilla Publishing.

Some of the things I cover in this book are building links to get your book’s amazon page to show up in Google; building a huge email list before you launch your first book; giving incentives to boost preorders; getting lots of book reviews quickly; and how to keep the book selling well even when you stop promoting.