Keep Your Books Selling: Author Level Up, #16

By M.L. Ronn

When was the last time you updated one of your books?

 

It's probably been a while, hasn't it? When we become authors, we publish our books and move on to the next story. Then YEARS pass by and we realize there were so many things we missed!

 

Forgetting to update a book can cost you money. Here are some examples of horror stories that might be lurking in your book portfolio:

• Doing a promo and forgetting to change the price back…
• Publishing a wrong version of a book…
• Forgetting which book description you were supposed to use…
• Losing your book files because of a virus or damage to your computer…

 

If your blood pressure is up, don't worry—we all make these mistakes from to time. But if you want to become a prolific author AND make a good income, you must learn to manage your books properly.

 

In this guide, prolific author M.L. Ronn will teach you the system he adopted to manage his growing portfolio of 70+ books of fiction and nonfiction.

 

You'll discover:

• How to future-proof your books to keep them selling
• How to always know what's going on with all your books on all retailers
• Tools to help you stay on top of managing your books
• How to anticipate changes at book retailers that could make your book files obsolete
• How to prepare your heirs to manage your books when you die

 

This book will help you get more organized and make more money from your books. If anything, it'll stop you from losing money that you didn't know you were losing.

 

V1.0

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author Level Up LLC
• Release date: Nov 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201466916

M.L. Ronn

Science fiction and fantasy on the wild side! M.L. Ronn (Michael La Ronn) is the author of many science fiction and fantasy novels including the Modern Necromancy, The Last Dragon Lord, and Sword Bear Chronicle series. In 2012, a life-threatening illness made him realize that storytelling was his #1 passion. He’s devoted his life to writing ever since, making up whatever story makes him fall out of his chair laughing the hardest. Every day.

Book preview

Keep Your Books Selling

KEEP YOUR BOOKS SELLING

MANAGE YOUR BOOK PORTFOLIO AND MAKE MORE MONEY

M.L. RONN

Copyright 2021 © M.L. Ronn. All rights reserved.

Published by Author Level Up LLC.

Version 2.0

Cover Design by Pixelstudio.

Covert Art © jemastock / Depositphotos.

Editing by BZ Hercules.

Special thank you to the following people on Patreon who supported this book: Zhade Barnet, Stephen Frans, Michael Guishard, Jon Howard, Beth Jackson, Megan Mong, Lynda Washington, and Etta Welk.

Some links in this book contain affiliate links. If you purchase books and services through these links, I receive a small commission at no cost to you. You are under no obligation to use these links, but thank you if you do!

For more helpful writing tips and advice, subscribe to the Author Level Up YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/authorlevelup.

CONTENTS

What You’ll Learn in This Book

A Helpful Analogy

Backing Up Your Work

Gathering Your Books' Metadata

Gathering Your Books' Production Details

Cover Design

Editing

Your Book's Interior

Book Description

Honorable Mention: Traditional Publishing

Going from Good to Great and Great to Excellent: Quality-Checking Your Books

Quality-Checking Your Book

Checking Your Book Prices

Parting Words: The Future of Book IP Management

Read Next: The Indie Author Bestiary

More Books by M.L. Ronn

Meet M.L. Ronn

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS BOOK

If you're anything like me, when you publish your first book, you're already thinking about the next one. In a short matter of time, aside from some marketing, your first book exits your mind altogether. This cycle repeats with every new book you publish.

If you keep at it, you'll wake up one day and have dozens and dozens of books to your name—and if you're lucky, you'll be making great money too. But boy, oh boy, managing your books will be a nightmare. When I say nightmare, I mean the kind where you get chased by a giant spider and you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat panting, only to discover that you're still dreaming, and the spider is waiting at the foot of your bed.

If you don't do it correctly, managing your books will be a nightmare within a nightmare.

Let me give you an example of how managing your books can turn into a nightmare if you don't do it correctly. From 2014 until 2020, Google Play sold books under the wholesale pricing model, which meant that they would discount your book to sell it. If you listed your book at $4.99, Google would discount it to $3.85 for readers. That meant that if you wanted to truly sell the book at $4.99, you had to list it at around $6.50 so that Google would discount it to the price point you wanted. You also had to do this to avoid the Amazon algorithms price-matching your book based on the Google price—often, if Amazon found out Google was selling your book at $3.85, it would drop the price to $3.85 too.

Fast-forward to 2021, where Google has switched from wholesale pricing to agency pricing. Now, it will sell your books at the price point you list them at. No more discounting. But there's just one problem: all the books you've published in the last seven years are now priced 20 percent higher than they should be! Your books stop selling overnight.

And there's an even bigger problem: Google's announcement email went to your spam filter, so you missed the news. You don't discover the pricing news until it's too late—not only have your sales at Google dried up, now you have to go back and re-price all your books. Will your sales come back to their regular levels? Who knows?

That's what I call a big event. Fortunately, events like this don't happen that often.

However, consider the little events that are far more common:

You run a promotion but forget to change the price of your book to the original price after the promotion ends, but you don't discover it for weeks, months, or years.

You list one of your books at the wrong price.

You list one of your bestselling books at the wrong price in another country's currency, hurting your sales.

You publish the wrong version of a book, one that included a bunch of typos that you already fixed.

You publish a book that fails EPUB validation, and it doesn't go on sale at several retailers.

You publish the wrong version of a book description—the one that doesn't convert.

Several hyperlinks in your book become broken over time, leading to bad reviews from readers.

You suffer a hard drive failure and lose all of your book files. This happens inconveniently just before you need to make a change to one of your books, and now you no longer have the source material.

Now, imagine for a moment that these types of issues exist in your book portfolio, but you don't know about them. You operate under the assumption that no news is good news, and that's mostly true, except when it's not. Sometimes no news means bad news when it comes to managing your books. How do you know if a problem exists out there? You can't check retailers every day.