I am always super excited when someone contacts me to proudly inform me that they had uploaded their manuscript on Amazon KDP, and it went live.
My euphoria plummets though when they tell me much later that they are making little to no sales.
This reoccurring sad incident led me to investigate, and I discovered certain mistakes that Authors often make when self-publishing. Let us discuss some of them below;
1. Poor Editing: This is the fastest route to bad reviews and low book ranking, and there is no way to remove bad reviews even when you have made corrections to your book. A common mistake self-publishers make is trying to skimp on having a professional editor. If you are not able to pay a professional editor to edit your manuscript, then ensure you use free online editing tools such as Grammarly and Hemingway.
2. Poor Book Description: A Sterling book description is your only chance to subtly persuade a reader to click and buy your book out of the array of books in his/her face daily. Spend quality time to work on your description, make it visually appealing and error-free, use bullets, highlights, and the bolding tool as appropriate. Ensure you also space well, so your book description does not look cramped up together.
3. Bad Cover Design: Readers do judge a book by its cover; this is a fact you should never forget. Your reader will never purchase your book if the design is shoddy or unprofessional. Imagine all the effort you put into your content wasted because you did not put sufficient attention on your book cover design. You can use Canva to design a superb cover design or pay a pro to do it.
4. Wrong Social Media Strategy: You can spend all your time posting about your book on your social media platforms and yet have dismal sales; that is frustrating, right? The blunt truth is folks do not care about you or your book. All they care about is; what can your book do for them? What transformation can reading it offer them?
By being, salesy (buy my book, buy my book, and buy my book, lol), you repel your readers. Rather than wearing yourself out with sales pitch, try to concentrate on the art of subtle selling via content creation and ultimately value addition.
5. Reckless Spending: You cannot use the yardstick of another Author to run your self-publishing journey. That another Author has professional editors, cover designs, researchers, and writers on their payroll does not mean it is time for you to do the same.
Ensure you spend within your budget and build gradually. Only outsource the tasks if it is necessary, and quality is assured. There are free tools that you can use in your self-publishing journey; this can then be upgraded to premium as your publishing business grows.
6. Erroneous Book Pricing: The best part of being a self-publisher is that no one is the boss of you, well kind of. So you are free to decide how much you want to make from each book, as impressive as this sounds, it is also the quicksand that sucks up and swallows Authors. Overpricing or underpricing your books can sometimes be the reason your book is not selling. Ultimately, have a plan for your book pricing. For instance, pricing your book 0.99USD on KDP can boost its ranking.
7. Giving Up too early: Ask any self-publisher, and they will tell you about that book that hit the bestseller list and that book that had dismal sales. To excel in your self-publishing journey, you need to research, write, publish, market, then repeat process. Once you hit the publish button, you need to start working immediately on the next book(s), thankfully some strategies make this process a walk in a park.
So are you self-published?
Which of these mistakes did you make?
Which of these mistakes are you about to make?
What specific lessons did you learn from this post?
Do tell me in the comment section.
FAVOUR AJAYI
The EBook Creation Guru
#TheEbookCreationGuru
#TestimonyPublishingHouse
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