The Zen of Marketing Kindle Ebooks: The Zen-of Series, #1

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Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

John Lennon

CONTENTS

THE ZEN OF MARKETING KINDLE EBOOKS

Chapter One: Publish Your Book Today

Make Money from Your Writing

Success Is a State of Mind

A Handshake with Yourself

A Mind-Blowing Time for Writers

How to Think about Money

The Books of Zen Series

Rejection Is a Lousy Lifestyle

Kindle Changes the Author’s World

The Number of Ebooks Being Sold

Seeing Cash Roll into Your Bank Account

This Book Is All About Harnessing the Clout of Amazon

Learn to Shoulder Marketing Right Now

Chapter Two: Making Your Book Have Feel

The Ring of Your Book

Many Marketing Tasks Must Begin Early

Running with a Timely, Arousing Subject

Using Robust, Exciting, Easy-To-Follow Language

Laying Out Your Book with Point-Blank Clarity

Making Marketing a Part of Your Writing

Chapter Three: Staying Abreast of the Market Place

The Age of Bulleted Text

Ideas & Search

Words on Paper

Titles

Art

Interior Art & Layout

Web Sites

A Cover Your In Love With 

A List of Steps for Your Cover

Chapter Four: Your Presentation

The Structure of Your Book

Ebooks

Paperbacks

What You Will Need for Your Paperbacks

Audiobooks

Chapter Headings as the Outline

Formatting the Pages

Chapter Five: Always Move Toward Your Market

Preparation for Marketing

Your New Book’s Information Sheet

Reviews

Your 20 Reviewers

Never Lose Your Forward Thrust

Ranking

Getting to Number One

Chapter Six: Staying Abreast of the Market Place

Categories and Paying Attention

Long-Tail Keywords

Tags

ISBN Numbers

Your Copyright

Trademarks

DRM - Digital Rights Management

The Power of the Mailing List

Piggybacking

The House That Amazon Built

Your Royalties

Chapter One :

Publish Your Book Today

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.

The statements show up in your every month, along with those from all your stores. They are a bit longer than the above quote, but sit back, close your eyes and visualize how wonderful it will be to have money rolling into your bank electronically, eliminating the bother of dithering around with checks.

Right now, as your read this, the opportunity to earn a solid living, even to make a fortune with your books is real world and readily available for you. The revenue stream is just sitting there; it’s waiting for you to get busy, to write books and to learn to use Amazon as an amazing marketing tool poised and ready for your decision to pursue your dream.

The trick for getting hot at book marketing—so you can actually be in a place for fully enjoying your life as an author/publisher—is to believe in yourself: to move right on past all your previous confusion: discouraging feedback from peers, friends and family; all self-doubt and blaming games; rejection slips from agents, publishers and magazines; and yes, even the ego trip of your treasured writer’s block.

From this flash point on, start setting all writer barricades aside, do it right now and start living in the moment. You will only be able to live in the moment for a split second at a time at first, but this afternoon, or tomorrow morning or evening, at some time right away, you will be able to stay in the groove for 2 seconds, then for 3, and 4 and 5, and soon—for hours on end, for the rest of your life.

In a heartbeat, you will fall right into that novel, that poem, the story that you are most in love with right now. When you learn to be able to decide in the moment to take breaks from your internal voices—even though it’s only for a split second—you will be taking your first baby steps toward the full-out exhilaration of living in the midst of the wholly realized writer’s life.

Then all the negatives—yes, even your cherished writer’s block ego trip—will fade into background noise, then you will find silence, and your story will take over. Before you know it, you will be working calmly and clearly for hours, rather than for a couple minutes.

1 hour, not 1 second, 2 hours, not 2 seconds, 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours of allowing your mind to come to rest from the horrid, every day, mental chatter we lock ourselves up with—a time to anchor within the natural spaciousness that you already know instinctively, know from deep within will make you feel full inside.

Allow fun to seep into your life—I mean REALLY, not just sort-of—not just mousy, droopy fun, but the real thing, the boisterous act of letting yourself loosen up: laugh till your jaw muscles are cramping; jump for joy, clearing the ground with thrust; goofing off with a fun afternoon, relaxing in the shade. Just like one of the great spiritual teachers, Jesus said, re-learn the art of abandon: And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Fun! Start re-learning how to enjoy the texture of life: smells, feelings, tastes, sounds, the real things. And it’s also time to fully develop soignée behavior, allow yourself to be the elegant, royal person you actually are, already. Learn to TAKE YOUR SWEET TIME.

You are preparing to make it possible to live in the writer’s dream, by learning to market your writing skills, your wonderful books. All it takes is believing in yourself for an instant, believing your power as a storyteller full, completely, absolutely without question. AND, letting go just long enough to create, to break the dam that’s holding you back. Just a little rupture so your energy starts leaking out, and you start learning to quit dwelling on any the thoughts related to your mental roadblocks.

You are now going to launch a new covenant with yourself, not like the old one with all those negative voices you have heard all your life. That’s the old, creeped-out world you inhabited before the turning point, before you decided to start letting go; you are no longer condemned to the fear-hold of perpetual blaming games.

All you must do is believe in yourself for one little instant, then another, and yet another, opening to that little gap, that space where your mind is clear. Soon you will have begun to giggle with the exhilaration, you will start breaking into full horse laughs like the Tin Man when Oz gave him a heart. Like the lion with his courage. Like Scarecrow with his bran-new brain, and Dorothy and Toto enjoying the happiness of their friends.

We call this change in your life, THE HANDSHAKE. It is handshaking with yourself, making a deal with you, a deal to give yourself some space, to take baby steps, cut through all negatives that hold you back and learn to enjoy the writer’s life. The art of giving-in to life itself is one of the most ancient spiritual truths. The first step onto THE PATH. Know that THE HANDSHAKE with yourself will take you on the big adventure of living the writer’s life.

You are a very fortunate author. Launching your work right here, in the early part of the new millennium is a profound opportunity. Writers have been around for a long, long time. In the distant past, we regaled those around the campfires with our tales. We are extremely important in holding the fabric of society together. We are the storytellers, the raconteurs who gather society’s myths, digest them in our beings and present them from our own unique visions.

Fiction, philosophy, science, beauty, spirituality, on and on and on, the writer channels the subconscious of humans and broadcasts those deepest segments of our knowledge for everyone, and the people envision their own lives, the way to live them as they assimilate the raconteur’s muse.

The storyteller has used many platforms for presenting, from the campfire to the quill pen, to the printing press, no matter how small the audience or how difficult to offer our work to the world, we have persisted. And now, as we enter the digital age fully, we have staggering equipment at our fingertips.

With your CreateSpace paperback and the Kindle Ebook published, you enter the vast, 21st century retail market place. Those first two products can bring you large sales, proportionate funds and your growing client base will always be craving words. Amazon’s revenue clear back on Christmas in 2014 was just below 15 billion, and online shopping has become a habit with a huge increment of the global buying public.

Of course, writing is only a percentage of the ever-growing worldwide web sales platform, but the growth is with us every year, and with very personal items like your book, purchases are not limited to the various holidays.

Amazon estimates that close to 50% of holiday shopping begins with them, using their price as the base for comparison with other vendors. And it is logical that with habits like reading that people enjoy year-round, the bean counters massage similar formulas. This is terrific news, since Amazon Search is now so huge, probably around 60 percent of the book market.

So, right alongside the big publishing houses in New York, you will be looking for your share of the ever growing, online, retail sales market. And you can now get your book published for sure. That fact alone is a wonderful breakthrough for people who know that they are destined to write, that they must write, that they will only be fulfilled if they get to write.

This beginning of the 21st century is a wonderful time for real writers because you CAN get published, no question about it. Recognition of your work is no longer stymied, trapped as a manuscript in a drawer of your desk due to the caprices of a pack of publishers, agents and editors chasing a fast buck. Those used car types no longer control your destiny as an author.

The runaway ebook market of the early 2000s has tapered off into a slower growth curve. You will have to work on marketing your book, but you don’t have to demean yourself, to become a sleazy sales type.

The reason that you don’t have to be a fast-talking shuck and jive artist, like so many players on the net is the massive power of Amazon and Search in general. You must learn the muscle of SEARCH―remember that Amazon and Google are both search engines, and the word for what they do is SEARCH.

You will have to cover some basic strategies: write a terrific book; have an eye-catching cover; follow the ins-and-outs of the Amazon’s Kindle doggedly and so forth. You will face a hefty, somewhat complex set of guidelines for the Amazon Marketing Tools the moment you start writing, but don’t worry, we cover that material later in this book and in The Zen of Writing Kindle Books.

Before long you will realize that Chapter 9 alone, more than pays for this book. It is an amazing list that lays out all the tasks involved in with your book and when you must start working on them. This is extremely valuable knowledge because of the time it takes to discover all these matters.

Make Money from Your Writing

The opportunity for publication of your work is now certain. You no longer have to beg agents and publishers. You can feel completely free in THE HANDSHAKE, in making that covenant to pursue the writer’s life all the way. Go ahead and keep the day job till those monthly Amazon emails signify a wonderful deposit in your bank account, but you now know that you are free.

That exciting moment in a writer’s trail of demanding work is sitting there on the internet, waiting for you with somewhere around sixty percent of the book market. The sense of self-esteem for having become a bona fide published author will always stay with you, making you a good deal more self-confident.  However, you must rest assured that the bells and whistles that will enliven you for being published are a short-lived thrill.

This is not to put the joy of being in print down, no, it is simply a flag that a ton of marketing work must take place while you write, and it must pick up steam upon publication if you hope to generate healthy cash flow from your work.

And of course, your writing success will inspire you to write more and more. The income will feel marvelous; AND, you must remember that the more you write and publish, the more you will want to pay attention to creating your manuscripts, and the less you will want to spend time on day-to-day chores, including writing tasks like editing, manuscript layout, formatting and so forth. You will see clearly that it takes money to keep your life on track in this new world of the working writer.

You will end up wanting money to pay for people to take care of those publishing tasks and for your everyday needs like food, friends, lovers, fun times and your life’s chores. You may end up so jazzed on your work that you want someone to clean your home.

No matter what you chose as expenses, how you budget your interpretation of your needs, you will want money, and there is a strong chance that you will want more and more of it. You may not have a burning desire to be jillionaire, but rest assured that your cash flow is always very important.

Many artists, writers, musicians, spiritual people and other types of cultural creatives that feel a deep artistic drive, tend to view their revenue stream as a trivial subject. This approach is a huge mistake; money is simply a benign tool like axel grease is for making wheels turn around. You will come to place after you are published, a next step in your life if you are a truly aroused writer, a place that is laced with decision making overtones and marketing will be a huge part of that process.

The questions are simple: YOU CAN GET RICH with your words, but is that your goal? Or, you can take a chill pill and simply enjoy being published and maybe put up a few more books as you wind your way along, making a living in other ways. Or, you can pump up your sales, not becoming a sales clown, living for the next deal, but by writing about what is heartfelt, and paying enough attention to marketing to earn a comfortable living.

Success Is a State of Mind

All this freedom is wonderful news, the only knowledge that you probably cannot see now is that the ability to hang in there is what makes new books materialize; they are simply thoughts until you get them out to share with the world. And that is why making THE HANDSHAKE with yourself is so important.

It is often repeated that Woody Allen said: Eighty percent of success is showing up, and with time you will find it true. The certain way for you to make it is to keep writing your books, and remember that with marketing, you may have to try 100 different things before your sales start picking up speed, so keep on keeping on. Do not let foolish pride get in your way, always look for solid help and never hesitate to enlist people when you are stuck.

If you choose the get rich path, you may find yourself fabulously well to do overnight like the much-touted legends of 21st century, internet publishing, people like Amanda Hocking. However, but be careful about living on overblown fantasies. A huge majority of writers who have tried to break the bank have failed.

A more practical approach is to develop a solid footing state of mind. Remember that you are in there for the long haul, that you are a writer and getting to do what you want every single day, is one of the true blessings on the planet.

Most everyone would give almost anything to wake up in the morning and be blessed to spend the day doing only what they love to do. So, take a dozen deep tiger breaths and tell yourself that most people do have to have several books out to start feeling their success; and their cash flow doesn't grow explosively; for most it develops slowly and steadily as horrible as the thought may sound. That is a grounded approach.

The huge shift for the author is that the choice to start making money and enjoying the writer’s life is now entirely up to you. With internet marketing and banking alongside the vast power of Amazon Search, developing a life supporting revenue stream for each of your works is a door, a magical passage sitting there waiting for you to venture into the cash flow.

A Handshake with Yourself

Michelangelo’s brilliant Italian Renaissance image of the hands in the Sistine Chapel is one of the most universal pictographs in the world, one that a vast number of people identify with completely. The know it intimately the instant they see it, and a deep sense of déjà vu sweeps over the witness in the same heartbeat.

In the energy of the hands panel, in that breathtaking, launching instant of God’s extended index finger ready to transmit the life force to Adam, we witness the stunning event of vitality being just a hairsbreadth away from the first human.

One anticipates the tremendous power of God—shown in his overflowing figure—seen in that full panel painted on the ceiling, God is afire with spirit, and