The Zen of Launching Books with Amazon: The Zen-of Series, #1

By Terry Kennedy

YOUR BOOK WILL FADE AWAY

Within the month it will be lost!

A robust book launch is a requirement for saving it!!!
Without blasting off with a well-executed plan, your new book—that you have worked so hard to produce—will dissolve into the nothingness of the of the Amazon Matrix within the month!
If I Get to #1 on the Amazon Bestseller List am I home free?
No, your book and your brand as a writer will fall down the rabbit-hole just like Alice; If you are not precise with your launch; if you are not diligent about your post-launch marketing and are not publishing your new books on a regular basis.
The rabbit-hole is the immense Amazon Database.
It is very easy to slip off into oblivion. When that happens, you will never appear on the first page of Amazon Search. And without being on the 1st page people will not buy your book.
It's that simple.
But, how do you know?
In a month? That sounds like it's a bit much. I mean this whole rabbit-hole thing. Where did you get this information?
We know because we have tested.
We have used our own, solid footing press books to watch what really happens. We published without a powerful launch just to observe real-world. A great title with a beautiful cover, with no real marketing dropped to 3.5 million in Amazon Ranking within a month.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Solid Footing Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780990307143

Book preview

THE ZEN OF LAUNCHING BOOKS WITH AMAZON

LAUNCH BOOKS THAT GET TO THE TOP

(The Zen-Of Book Series) (Book 2)

Terry Kennedy

© SOLID FOOTING PRESS

VENICE BEACH – GETTYSBURG – NICE – ISLA MUJERES

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ALWAYS GIVE REVIEWS FOR ALL INDIE BOOKS

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FOR BENJAMIN KENNEDY

ONE OF THAT HANDFUL OF TRULY AMAZING GUYS

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Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you.

Katherine Anne Porter

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Table of Contents

Your Book Will Fade Away

Chapter One

Learn to Enjoy Time Itself

Your Website Is a Must

Launches Must Be Precise

Never Forget Your Cover

The Revenue Stream Is Just Sitting There

Chapter Two

10 Steps for Making Money from Your Writing

A Mind-Blowing Time for Writers

The Zen-of Books

Amazon changes the Author’s World

Take Full Advantage of Amazon

Marketing Can Be Fun

Start Your Book Launch While You Are Writing

You Don’t Have to Know a Damned Thing

Keep Your Enthusiasm for Your Message Alive

Chapter Three

Make It Sizzle

Guide Prospects to Your Blog

The Landing Page Is Your Portal

Focus Is Always about Enjoying the Writer’s Life

The 7 Faces of Laser Beamed Unveiling

Your 20 Reviewers

Giving Your Book Away

Always Getting Out There

Chapter Four

Long Before You Launch

Taking Amazon Ranking with a Grain of Salt

A Pie in the Sky Mindset

Chapter Five

Categories and Paying Attention

Long-Tail Keywords

Launches Are All About Your Readers

Kindred Spirits Are What It Is All About

Chapter Six

Your Marketing Campaign

Book Aggregators and Distributors

Algorithms and Stick-to-it-iveness

Ardent Readers Boost Launches

Testing the Zen-of Approach

The Power of Launch Promotions

Generating a Best Seller

Chapter Seven

Growth Hacking and Your Launch

Okay, So How Much Money Can I Earn?

Your Amazon Landing Page

The Author Profile Page

Bloggers – Springboard to a Strong Brand

Your Legacy and Channel Books

Chapter Eight

Giving Books Away with Goodreads

Amazon Paid

Google AdSense

BookBub

The Paid Website Dog Pack

Video Book Trailers

Should I Use Forums?

Chapter Nine

Enjoy Healthy Sales

During Your Launch, Think Long Term

Remember the Writer’s Life

Reviving Your Old Books with New Sales

Front Matter – No B.S. Plugs in the Beginning of Your Book

Back Matter – The Stage for Your Career

The Clown Show of Social Media

Always Pricing Your Books

Spread Your Horizons

Chapter Ten

Your Books Are Never Lost

Make the Plan

The Decision

The More You Write

Tear Down the Wall That Hassles You

Plenty of Room on the Amazon Platform

Passion

Follow the Rules

Stay Jazzed

As You Write and Market, Make Use of the Lists in This Book

Refresh the Memory

Give and You Will Get Back

Get Ready, Go!

Right About Now

Journal Your Adventure

Don’t Be Too Hard On Yourself

Remember, the Goal is to Live the Writer’s Lifestyle!

Wrap It Up In a Bow and Give It to the World

About the Author

Your Book Will Fade Away

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When your ship comes in

The following is a direct quote from Amazon, and, if you are a real writer, it is one of the most fun things you will ever see in your life:

This royalty payment notification is for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) sales recorded in the Kindle Store. Payment will be made to your bank account and should appear in your available balance within 2 to 5 business days after the Payment Date. Details of the payment will be available on the Payment Report after it has been processed by your bank.

The email that the above is quoted from comes for you every month, along with notes about payments from the various Kindle Stores in which you are selling, and they make you feel terrific. What a knockout: there is my money, flowing in as receivables each and every month, like clockwork, from all around the globe and waiting for me in my personal bank account, sitting there to use as I see fit.

Within the month it will be lost in the Amazon ranking!

Your hard work quickly disappears into digital fuzz.

A robust book launch is a requirement

Without one, without an extremely well designed and executed plan, your new book that you have spent a year or so of your life laboring so hard to create, will dissolve into the nothingness of the of the Amazon Matrix, within the month!

HELP ME!!!

What do I do to keep my book from slipping down the rabbit-hole?

How do I give my book a fabulous launch and keep the presence there?

Do I have to give copies of my book away?

This online publishing thing is a mess. Info is all is scattered all over the net?

And you can’t tell what’s hype and BS and what’s not!

How do I tell what's fake news?

It’s so painful to watch your Amazon Ranking slip away, and to feel so completely helpless from not being able to do anything! If I get to #1 on all those bestseller lists, how can my presence start sliding down the rabbit hole?

The Zen-of books SLASH THROUGH all that FAKE NEWS fast!!!

Why read THE ZEN OF LAUNCHING BOOKS WITH AMAZON? Because it lays the facts and pulls them together:

SEVEN MUSTS FOR A BOOK LAUNCH

Choose a book that a large group of people will crave.

Start your launch while you are writing.

Write a book that sizzles.

Start your cover while writing.

Do a cover that you are tickled to hand out.

Start building your database while writing.

Review and rehearse your launch while you are writing.

How will they know I’m in the matrix?

Your own strata of readers must find you, to notice that you are there, to click through to your landing page, commit to buying or somehow reading your writing, and then review a book. Readers, like everyone else, are swamped with the online info-blahs. But, you will have you free books, your Legacy Books on Amazon which people will seek out because they are giveaways and your Channel Books on Amazon, which will inspire prospects to join forces with your mailing list.

Only 25% of the books read get reviews

The Blahs from info-gridlock are everywhere on the net. With books, the majority of the books read, the titles that readers even bother to skim through, are from Amazon lending or giveaways, or they are bought used. Amazon, book publishers, used book sellers, literary agents and all the other third-party, bottom feeding vendors grab a lot of money from labor of authors, just like pan handlers off the good will of working class stiffs.

Your unique significance to your reading audience

Your own hotbed of readers is ready to give you a thumbs-up because they know, and love your work, but first, you must make contact with them. It’s a complex rescue—authors learning to keep from being lost to the Amazon Vortex. We have tested the decent into the abyss and without know-how, your book will be out in nah-nah-no-nosville, sinking to a ranking at seven million in just three months.

With internet book sales, divide and conquer is the name of the game

The new global cesspool of commerce splits and divides us more rabidly that ever. This is one of the main control tools for the uber-rich. The internet and cell phones have consumers dumbed down to overwhelm.

Consumers are trained from birth as buying machines

Corpro-cash-flow depends on that training to dumb us down so we blindly watch the brand-spin and grab for WHATEVER. Even with a neat tool like Amazon your book is ready to be spread thin as a brand. Bend over and grab your shoe laces. You are soon to be kicked into the corpro-matrix. Gone! Kaput! Vaporized!

Our books, AND the net are extensions of ourselves

Remember that there is something kinda wonderful in bonding. No matter how the uber rich with their corpro puppets like the media and politicians try to beat humans into submission, we still have a sense of coming together with one another that is written in the gene code.

Our book’s chance to be saved from the matrix

William Faulkner said it perfectly in his Noble Prize speech over half a century back in the day:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

But how does that save my book from the whirlpool of net fuzz?

It means that you have some limited control over unmitigated descent into the whirlpool of information by writing from the heart and finding those people who resonate with your own . . . old verities of the heart. Connecting with them deeply and thoroughly will give you the cash for living the writer’s life, and not just toiling endlessly for free. And there is a chance that you may even become a best seller.

The net is no more relevant than smoke signals

The dynamic is separating out the corpro-scrum and sticking with the joy of living in a surround of what Faulkner calls . . . the old verities of the heart. That is your great power as a writer. That is also where your money is, the readers that share in your appreciation of our humanness.

The smoke puffs came from a person on the ground with a pelt

The message was not the importance of the puffs but the change in activity on the other end. The whole world on the other end would change the action of a tribe, which is what happens when readers who love your work get so charged that they will always find a venue for staying in touch with your words.

The interest of your readers is not just attraction to your thoughts

When you think readers, they are moving in a direction of attitude that draws them together as a herd. Your writing itself. Not so much. The effects they are feeling viscerally when they move on from reading to their day at large keep them wanting to return.

Your words allow your reader to broaden their scope in the day-by-day

Just like a lineman’s set of climbing spikes for shooting up poles, they grab a latte and with that rush of caffeine start feeling jazzed with the thoughts from your latest book and go out to the world broadcasting from the charge of your inspiration.

With latte in hand, your reader scatters seeds

Inspired and ready to go, with the release of caffeine charged talk, your readers are walking broadsides that will provide umph that builds, then adds to propelling the launches for you more of your books.

Big Data is mostly a click-through background noise

Like the umph of the fans at a big, noisy event, the social media crowd feels the jittery effect, is exhilarated for a bit, then leaves and forgets all your books without ever buying any of your work. The big data of social media are very often lame and meaningless, just like a burnt-out signal fire.

The art of the storyteller is as old as the signal fire, probably older

Each author’s unique feel is what compels their audience to click through for that new read. In the end, the writer actually feels it with the bottom line of deposits in their bank accounts. Somewhere around 75% of the adult fiction in the USA is presented in the digital formats and somewhere near a quarter of those sales are the results of indie authors leaving that reader inspired when she or he has gone out for that latte right after a read of your work.

The indie market has leveled out

Which makes the writer’s financial life more grounded after 2016. When markets are going bananas, they will fall, but when they have fallen, profit streams can be forecast. There were somewhere around a million and a half best-selling titles in the top four genres in digital titles for 2016, which gives a writer room among the big numbers to get your very own group of readers headed out to broadcast, over lattes, about their read of your work.

If I get to #1 on the Amazon Bestseller List, am I home free?

No, your book and your brand as a writer will fall down the rabbit-hole just like Alice if you are not precise with your launch, if you are not diligent about your post-launch marketing and are not publishing your new books on a regular basis.

The rabbit-hole is the immense Amazon database

It is very easy to slip off into oblivion, to take the fall off into the millions in ranking. When that happens, you will never appear on the first page of Amazon Search. Your book will never show up on page one. And without being on the 1st page, new search engine people will not buy your book.

It’s that simple

But, how do you know

In a month? That sounds like it’s a bit much. I mean this whole rabbit-hole thing. Where did you get this information?

We know because we have tested

We have used our own, Solid Footing Press books to watch what really happens with the Amazon Computers. We have published and not marketed at all just to observe the reality of the situation. A great title with a beautiful cover, with no real marketing dropped to 3.5 million in Amazon Ranking within a month.

Another great book with a hot cover was allowed to sit without doing serious marketing. Then serious tests—like running an intense Amazon, KDP giveaway—and watching the position rise abruptly in the ranks, hold for a while at a fairly good slot, then ease back-off toward the million position within a couple months.

We performed many tests, without worrying about the results of our own financial gain in sales, because we wanted to have this first-hand information for the Zen-of series.

A BOOK’S FADE-OUT IS WHIPPED WHILE YOU ARE WRITING

Launching your new books with skill, making sure that they are formidable with their unveiling is one of the most important factors that will allow you to live the writer’s life.

You must be ever diligent, to start while you are still writing so you have plenty of time to prepare for your launch.

If you are sloppy, if you slough off the myriad of details and decide to chance it, to just get your book published on Amazon because you are chomping at the bit, you will most probably not enjoy strong sales.

Unless you are already well known, with a big following, your book’s ranking with Amazon will soon slip into the nothingness of the Amazon Matrix and virtually disappear.

This is a fact. As we mentioned, we are testing a new title right now to see what actually happens with a great title, a hot cover, a powerful, potential demographic but no launch and no marketing except a bit of attention to keywords and categories. We published the paperback with CreateSpace and are not doing the Kindle edition until the actual launch.

This experiment is partially designed to look more closely at paperback sales for new Amazon books and to watch what Amazon Search does. The only promotional effort is that we are running a traditional GoodReads giveaway of 3 print copies. This is all minimalist, so we can see how things actually happen. 

Nimbly, precisely and with perfect timing, you can take charge of your sales. Ranking on Amazon and the size and fervor of your mailing list are the two most powerful tools in your shed. The list can get you up and running in ranking, but your ongoing success depends on you learning to stay up there till you launch your next book.

Since you are now a publisher, as well as an author, you must pay attention to the publisher’s chores. You must have some sense of who your audience will be, how big it is and how you will reach them before you ever start to write. Otherwise, unless you have a solid brand for something other than