Hi! Dale Beaumont here, welcome to another episode of Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help you write, publish and market your own get selling book. On our last video we’re talking about a great new website, it’s actually new. It’s been around for a few months now but it’s called smash woods and you should really go to the website smashwoods.com and really check it out because if you’re a book lover or big fan book reader, then you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of great books which are available. Free to download for free or for a very little cost.
Then they can all be read on your computer or in any of your hand held reading devices that you may have. so very, very cool but what is so exciting now is that the author publishes/self publishes and the pending offers can now have a stage, they can now have a platform, they can now have an opportunity to really share their books with a global audience. So I want you to think about this because they are found of Mark Coker said that smash wood is kind of like the YouTube for books.
Now, if you are familiar with the website YouTube they’ve got literally thousands and thousands of videos on there and there’s basically YouTube kind of forces that play, there are people that are content creators which created this great content. They load the videos up and then there’s the audience, people that then go and they access all those videos. A lot of them How To’s, a lot of them are funny and then some of the are music quick, whatever you like and it’s a perfect relationship with hot it actually works.
The same thing for books, what you have is you’ve got authors and publishers that upload books, upload files and then you have these massive audience of thousands and thousands of people everyday that go to the web site. There are looking for a new material and the two kind of feed each off other. their way of already exploring kind of part one of the presentation , how it works from a book lovers perspective but now we’re going to explore how it actually works and why it works from an authors perspective or a publishers perspective.
And what I want to do is I'm going to talk about the five reasons why you should really consider selling your books or at least have your books available on sashwords.com. So let me just go though them now, the first one is you get to tuck-in to an in-built audience. Think about YouTube, they already have an in-built audience. They are thousands of people out there, its not thousands it actually hundreds of millions o0f people that know about YouTube. They go to YouTube everyday to look for information.
Now, of course Smashwords isn’t this big yet but they actually attract thousands of visitors a day and there’s a huge audience there, there was already hungry, they are really qualified and they are looking for information. If you can provide them the right information that they are looking for then you’re going to attract sales without having to do a lot of the marketing yourself because there are thousands of people which are visiting that site every single day.
Now, of course it helps to market your book. Don’t get me wrong but they’ve already got a following in. they have already got traffic which is they know the most important thing that you need to create as an independent author, let’s just call it that so I didn’t have to go through all of the different terms. That’s the first massive reason.
The second one is that is has a global reach. What is so exciting about this is, there are people visiting smash words from all over the world and from all different countries so there are a lot of different services out there that can just deal in people in America or dear people to Australia or people in the UK or some of the Asian countries but this is a website that is becoming a really global community and so people from all around the world can both put their files up and also they search for books as well. And why this is so cool is because they are all digital. There’s no delivery, there’s no distribution, you don’t have to worry about transportation costs and delivery and shipping and all that stuff, its all down just through your downloaded electronic files and that’s the reason why it can tuck-in to a huge global audience.
Number three is that you can actually tap into the actual digital book marker which is growing rapidly everyday, now at the moment it maybe one, two, three percent of all boos sales are actually sold in digital format as what we would know at term is eBooks, however, that number I believe is almost doubling 12 months and I’ve even heard some people say its doubling every six month which means that it is becoming more and more acceptable. That is probably going to take maybe another two, three, five years before it may be main stream but as time went by mp3 players and iPods were kind of like a little obscure and nobody had them but now almost everyone has an mp3 player or an iPod and that’s the primary way that they are accessing their music content.
Now, some people can argue and look at what take longer with books, some people may say to take five years or 10 years before it really catches on but who cares? The really is that there are people right now that prefer to work with digital books for a whole bunch of different reasons and that market is growing and instead of waiting before it gets main stream, why don’t you have your book on there anyway so when it does get bigger you can have picked up all of that growth along the way.
So, when I say tucking into this huge market out there, there are some people that prefer, maybe they are environmentally friendly or whatever but they prefer to read books on their computers a opposed to wasting trees and buying hard covered books, or hard copy books and printing out using their printer but there are also other people that prefer to access digital books for convenience.
Recently, I was on the cruise ship and going around the Baltic area and there was a whole lot of people that were walking past when in was sitting on the cruise ship reading their books on the Amazon kindle on the Sony eReader and that was just pretty amazing for me because I hadn’t really you know, being from Australia they haven’t really taken of very much here yet but certainly the wave ahs started in America and these devices and now regularly available.
It’s very logical that these people who are traveling and spending a month or two away from home if they are tired and they don’t have any wok to do, what are they going to do? They are going to read. So, I went up to a couple of them and I asked them, so do you want to tell me about the Amazon kindle? Why do you love it so much? And they said well, if I was to pack like 10 or 15 books that would take up half of my luggage and I might end up just having to throw them away at the end but by having is on kid like in a store. Two, three, four, five thousand books on here probably you wouldn’t have read that many but even if you still have a hundred books on there and its just in one tiny little device that’s no bigger than the book that I'm holding in my hands. So, you can actually have a hundred books to something that’s thinner as small and is thin as this.
So, it really is quite amazing, quite incredible. That market is growing all the time and Smashwords gives people the opportunity, gives authors and publishers the opportunity to have their content available and to tuck-in to that ever growing market of people that are preferring now to access their books in digital format. And even I am thinking of going that way as well.
I kind of just decided of that about two years ago, I was never going to buy another CD in my life and I buy all of my music through iTunes and I just put it directly unto my iPod or my iPhone and I'm honestly thinking of making decision as well saying I wont buy anymore physical books, I’ll just get Amazon Kindel or Sony eReader or a Culor or whatever you have on there. New devices that are coming and all of my books will then just be stored on that. So people are going to be starting to make the same decisions and there’s already a market out there and you can start to tap into it.
All right, number four is: it’s a great way, a fantastic way for you as an author to get feedback; you can get your books out there before you have to outlay thousands of dollars if you obviously want to have some form of editing I believe but for type setting and for printing. You want to find out that your books any good. You want to find out that people like it.
You want to find out what are the holes, what are the gaps, what are the things that people want to know more about and the only way to really find that out is by getting your book out there into your market place because again. yes, maybe if you have done a few, printed off a few copies and give them to your family and friends but they are probably going to tell you, its great, its fantastic, everyone is going to love it but you really want to get feedback from real people.
People that actually don’t know you, you don’t have relationship, find out what they think because if you can win those people over, then your book is destined to do very, very well. So, that’s a really great reason why you should have your books unto Smashwords is that you can test the market. You can actually find out what people like and make sure that you’re really hitting the marks; so, a big, big point.
And then, once you’ve proven that your book really works and once you’ve proven that its exactly what people want and you’ve aided the bugs there and you feel much more confident, much more secure to move on to second base which is print on the manual;, even to go to third base and go to self-publishing.
And number five is, it’s an excellent way to build your some people call it your author platform. Some people call it your followers; some people call it your fan base, your database, your herd. Whatever you want to label and basically you want to build you audience. You want to build a thousand, five thousand, 10 thousand people, they all like you, know you and that they believe in the quality of your work and want more.
That is a really powerful thing that all major publishers which is kind of like the home. All major publishers are looking for that. They didn’t want to be kind of gambling really on people that are completely unknown. They want to work with people are already “made it”, they already have established their audience so then that way they are not taking a risk and gambling. They are kind of betting on something that has already a level of success and now they can take that to a whole new level.
So, I know a lot of people that what they have done is they have given their first book away for free. They haven’t actually charge for it which some people would say it’s crazy. You know, you should charge for your book but these people have done is, they have given their content away for free. They built this huge audience and now all those people, this is the thing, they didn’t want to buy the physical version of the books. So, for some people prefer to buy it and have them in their shelf and so they can pull it out at any time or they will pre-market for books number two, three, four, five, and as many as you like.
And so, if you have established that huge audience, that’s a very powerful thing that you can take to a publisher and it give you great leverage when it comes to your negotiation. So, just to wrap up this video, just very quickly; if you want to learn about how to get your book on to Smashwords then, check out the websites Smashwords.com and you can sign up for a free account. You can put your books up there, you can load as many files as you’d like and go through all of the step on how to actually load the files, what format they need be in, etc.
There’s actually free kind of freestyle guide, I can't think of what it’s actually called now but that is published by Smashwords and it would show you how what format it should be and how to upload the file. You can put an image there, you can put testimonials in, you can put reviews, you can put a description, so you can put all of the things that you normally would’ve expect to have and you could also set the price of the book. And it also allow to set the standard on how much of the book that you want to give away for free, maybe you want to give away 20%, 30%, 50% of the book for free. Then, if they’d want the rest then they have to pay some money or you can choose to give the whole things away for free.
And what is so cool about this is, is that of you do decide to charge money then you keep that 80%, 85% I believe of the profit is of course the one of overheads and running cost with the very big website like Smashwords. So, they only retain a 15% which I think is a very, very generous deal especially considering that Smashwords has already got a huge fan base, already of people that know the website, that used the website and that downloaded books on a regular basis and you can tap into that.
So, something that is very cool, very exciting and what is so great is that you can have your books available in os many different formats because when you are staring out in this sort of thing, you can't afford to be picky and choosy. You can't afford to say, well I'm only going to sell my books on amazon.com or I'm only going to sell my books to Buy Books. That’s kind of great but you want to be able to tap into every single distribution outlet possible and by having your books on Smashwords.
You can tap into like 10 different formats and attract 10 different styles of book readers with very little to know work on your own path other than just of course writing the book and uploading the file but then it will work the software and the mechanical component is all handled by the website.
So , hopefully that gives you a better understanding of what it is and how it actually works. I encourage you to check it out and one day I hope to actually interview Mark Coker who’s the founder of Smashwords here on Get Published TV so stay tuned for future episodes. You’ll never know what’s around the corner and if you want to leave me comments or a feedback or something that you want to add to the conversation, then head to getpublishedtv.com, leave us your comments and I’d love to her from you. See you again next time. Goodbye for now.
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