Nice people thread part 8 - worth the wait

tomterm8

KDP is kindle direct publishing. You can read kindle books on a previewer to check they are okay, you don't need to buy a kindle. At least, not at first...

But I don't want it to feel like I'm trying to push you in a direction you don't want to go...

Edit: it works differently to google. Say, you write a book about 37 recipies for frugal cooking. They buy it for $5. Amazon pays you $3.50. Given some books sell a hundred or more books a month - that is a lot of money. Higher risk, higher reward.

PasturesNew

tomterm8 wrote: »

KDP is kindle direct publishing. You can read kindle books on a previewer to check they are okay, you don't need to buy a kindle. At least, not at first...

But I don't want it to feel like I'm trying to push you in a direction you don't want to go...

Edit: it works differently to google. Say, you write a book about 37 recipies for frugal cooking. They buy it for $5. Amazon pays you $3.50. Given some books sell a hundred or more books a month - that is a lot of money. Higher risk, higher reward.

And I could write a book like that ..... if only I went out and bought some cooking equipment/dishes, cooked them all and spent time getting the photos right

Or am I just a perfectionist?

Anybody can write them, really need to be in London to get the chance of being promoted on the BBC morning breakfast programme.... which always annoys me that the BBC are promoting people who make money and yet the BBC say they carry no advertising. Those people who get their 4rses on the sofa have some PR machine behind them somewhere.

I have got a plan of making/publishing some tutorials..... just not got round to it yet.

tomterm8

Nah, you don't promote them. That would be a waste of time. You just write the next one...

It doesn't hurt to be a perfectionist. You want to write as good a book as you can. The frugal recipe book was just an off the top of the head thing... I don't know enough about you to give you a topic.

PasturesNew

tomterm8 wrote: »

Nah, you don't promote them. That would be a waste of time. You just write the next one...

It doesn't hurt to be a perfectionist. You want to write as good a book as you can. The frugal recipe book was just an off the top of the head thing... I don't know enough about you to give you a topic.

I guess there is stuff I could write.... but I've no idea how high the bar is. I've not seen other people's quality/quantity. No point entering the market as the cr4ppiest one out there ..... I'd be going in blind.

Need a benchmark.

tomterm8

PasturesNew wrote: »

I guess there is stuff I could write.... but I've no idea how high the bar is. I've not seen other people's quality/quantity. No point entering the market as the cr4ppiest one out there ..... I'd be going in blind.

Need a benchmark.

You can go to amazon and get the kindle viewer for PC (free) and sample books in your topic (free) .

As you get more specific there is less competition:

How to run a business... bazillions of books
How to run a typewriter repair business... only a few.

It's the kind of thing you get better at over time, anyway.

PasturesNew

tomterm8 wrote: »

You can go to amazon and get the kindle viewer for PC (free) and sample books in your topic (free) .

As you get more specific there is less competition:

How to run a business... bazillions of books
How to run a typewriter repair business... only a few.

It's the kind of thing you get better at over time, anyway.

I've just had a quick look within one subject of interest .... and the cheapest are selling at £0.77 and look pretty awful.

I'd ned to spend (waste) some time getting myself an image/branding - call that 2 days (more like a week as I'm not good at images).

Probably the first one would take me 3 hours to put together the words/photos .... then some learning time on how to get it from Word into whatever.

For 3 hours' work .... call it a whole day as there'll then be lots of wasted time "looking at it" online, seeing where it's being linked from (if at all), working out where I can link to it from .... so, say I can churn out one per day of good clean quality, and say I could understand the charging/rules there .... so I'd get 50p per item I'd need to flog just 100 to make it worthwhile. £50 = £7/hour.

That's actually quite a lot isn't it ...... but I guess it's a long-haul game. Write it once, then it's up there....

I guess my individual items could sell into collections.... so, once I've done a few dozen I could then sell collections of 5-10 to see if that does well.

michaels

PasturesNew wrote: »

During May I've written 22 new articles and made changes to/updated 128, which included updates and/or adding new images. So, not idle.... just "not very good at this any more"

so I don't suppose you have got worse so I guess the rules have changed - question is given the new rules does the business model exist any more and you just need to find out how to achieve the same results as before or whether it is now impossible without sufficient 'clout' to get the search results you need?

Perhaps you should think about property development instead, that's my plan for the day job not being lucrative enough....

PasturesNew

So, on the basis I have "continued to do what I always did" - and it didn't improve. It might be time to change tack.

PasturesNew

michaels wrote: »

so I don't suppose you have got worse so I guess the rules have changed - question is given the new rules does the business model exist any more and you just need to find out how to achieve the same results as before or whether it is now impossible without sufficient 'clout' to get the search results you need?

I felt the business model was flawed 3 years ago, which is why I decided to change what I was doing, but that all got swept aside due to what occurred in 2011-12.... and now I'm quite a bit behind that curve and "in the wrong place" in terms of space/lighting ... and even a letterbox.

I need to get back to my 2010 plan and invest in that.

PasturesNew

michaels wrote: »

Perhaps you should think about property development instead, that's my plan for the day job not being lucrative enough....

I don't have any skills, nor contacts... and I can't borrow any money. It's not for me really.

I think what you're doing is working mostly because of your location. Those doing well at this point will have something more going for them than "a few quid in the bank", especially as that few quid is "life's savings" and cannot be replaced by any method and cannot be depleted or risked.

You've probably got no perceived risk in what you're going to do, and/or could recover or have a Plan B - and have somebody to talk to/discuss stuff.

Bottom line is: If I lost everything right now, I'd never recover. If you lost everything right now you could probably recover in 5 years.