Book Launch Blueprint
Launch a bestselling book in 45 days without a mailing list or social media following.
1
Start Here…
Amazon has changed the book game forever. Digital books for outsell physical books around the world, and it’s time for you to get a piece of the action. When you follow this Blueprint, you will launch a successful book on Amazon, while keeping 70% of the profits.
The best part is that Amazon will handle the entire sales process for you, generating leads and revenue for years to come.
In this Blueprint, you’ll learn the strategy developed via the members-only Kindle Sniper System to push a book to the top of Kindle and keep it there in perpetuity.
To learn more about exploding your book on Kindle, read Breaking Orbit.
You only get 30 days from the moment you upload your book to Kindle to build traction. Trying to fix or relaunch a book outside of this window is three times as much work, and you end up fighting against Amazon every step of the way. Every time I launch a book, it is a bestseller within two weeks following this formula.
This is the blueprint of exactly how I launch every single book. You don’t need a list, social media following or any friends to give you reviews. You can do this completely on your own in any niche.
It feels pretty good when your first book gets that bestseller status from Amazon, and it feels pretty amazing to be the third most popular book on the entire platform.
These rankings are not a fluke and do not depend on a list or any type of following. I have launched bestsellers in multiple niches with zero experience. Nobody knew who I was and yet my books sell every single day and stay on the bestseller lists consistently.
In this blueprint, you will learn the exact strategy I use to write and launch bestseller after bestseller on Amazon.
First, we’ll cover how to find the perfect topic for your book and your future audience. Then you’ll learn how to write your book quickly and painlessly in a matter of weeks.
Then we will launch your book straight onto the bestseller list.
Finally, we will cover key strategies to maintain your book’s reign at the top of the rankings – maintaining this revenue stream for years.
How to Get the Most out of Your Blueprint
Firstly, if you have questions about this Execution Plan (or any other marketing question) please reply to one of my emails and I will help you directly.
Or post questions in the Serve No Master Member’s Forum.
Here’s how to get the most out of the content in this Execution Plan:
- Read the entire blueprint once – Read through this entire blueprint, watch any videos and download the resources. Don’t execute on the steps until you have finished reading the entire blueprint. This will help you understand the progression of the steps and put them into context.
- Complete the steps – This Blueprint is a checklist. Each step builds upon the next. Complete each step in order.
Lastly, here’s how to use the Execution Plan interface.
View the example Execution Plan below…
1. Blueprint Title – This is the topic you are learning 2. Section Number – Go through the sections in order 3. Individual Lessons – Each lesson is contained within a single dropdown 4. Navigation – To access additional Blueprints and advanced training
Download the Essential List of Book Launch Tools
I’ll be recommending a number of tools in this Blueprint so I created a resource that lists each of these tools and a link to find more information.
I recommend that you download this resource now and refer to it often as you set up your book launch.
Click here to download The Essential List of Book Launching Tools.
2
Launch Your Book
We’ll start this module by talking about how to launch a bestseller on Amazon.
Here, we’ll examine the 7-Step process to launch your book, from choosing a topic to generating buzz, that will help your book stand out and gain reviews and sales.
There are many topics and categories where you can place your first book on Amazon. The process starts with finding a category that suits you. Whether you want to write children’s books or cookbooks, the initial research phase is critically important. Peruse the Kindle Bestseller lists and find a category that interests you.
Take a look at the top five books in that category. You want the top five books for any keyword or category you choose to be in the top 30,000 of the Amazon rankings.
Once you have found the topic, category or keywords that fit what you want to write about, you can move on to the next phase of our plan.
Amazon gladly provides you all the competitive intelligence that you need to write the perfect book. Start by looking at the top 5 books you want to compete with. Their Amazon pages have all the information that you need to craft a killer table of contents, including:
Book Description – What promises does the author make? Your book should meet all the same promises.- Book Statistics – How long are these books? Your book should be of a similar size.
- Look Inside – Amazon lets you read the first few pages of each book and see their table of contents.
- Reviews – Read the best and worst reviews to find out what you must have in your book and what you can include to dominate the market.
For a longer book, you may need to go deeper and find additional informational sources. Whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction, there are some fabulous resources you can use to dial in your book strategy.
- Forums – What do people in your space talk about? What are the most popular forum topics and questions? What do they love/hate about other books in the space?
- Blogs – Read blogs by other authors and fans. Which posts get the most comments? What are the masses thinking about? What engages them?
- Google Scholar – Find original scientific source material to back up your claims and boost your credibility.
- Clickbank – What promises do more expensive courses on your topic make on their sales pages?
Perhaps making the female lead of your next romance novel plus-sized will bump your sales and increase your positive reviews…
Writing a book is hard if you look at a blank page in front of you. When you are on a high ledge, they always tell you to not look down. Both of these feel the same to me.
The key to writing your book effectively and efficiently is to break the process down into manageable parts.
Look at those bestselling books in your space. Amazon gladly tells you how long each of those books is. Use that number to create your target word count.
Plenty of successful books on Amazon are only 8,000 to 10,000 words long.
Take the number of pages in your goal and divide that up by how many days until you want to launch. If you want to launch a ten thousand word book in thirty days, you can work five days a week. If you write five hundred words for those twenty weekdays, your book will be done on time.
I use Scrivener to write all my books. I can create folders to match my daily goals. When I hit each daily goal, I close that folder and I’m done for the day.
Chopping your work up into small, manageable chunks will remove the fear from the task of writing.
Nobody is afraid of writing one sentence. It’s only when we get distracted by the big picture and focus on the size of a project that we feel overwhelmed. Write your book one sentence at a time.
You can write an entire book without touching a keyboard. Dictation is the fastest way to write a book. You can speak your entire book in just a few hours quite easily.
Most people can speak far more words per hour than they can type on a keyboard.
You can find dictation apps on both iOs and Android devices that will record your voice and automatically convert your words to text. You can record your entire book in ten-minute blocks to ensure that no data is lost.
The process of creating a cover that sells books starts with the title. Your title and category will determine the type of cover you want.
Start by looking at those same top five books in your category. What do their covers have in common?
A great cover for fitness might not make any sense for a book about dragons.
Your book will have FOUR main elements:
Title – The title of your book should connect with books in your space. Readers should know the category from the title.- Subtitle – Combine your top keywords to clearly explain the topic of the book and appear in the correct search results.
- Image – The main image will engage potential readers and cause them to click on your book to find out more.
- Author – The author’s name appears at the bottom of the cover, unless the author is arleady very famous.
These were the initial two images I considered for the cover of Serve No Master.
Each is an image that represents freedom and is drawn in a way that is easy to work with. Most people will see your book for the first time very small. You want a book that stands out from the crowd, even when small.
The cover on the left was my initial favorite, but it looks like the cover to a book about writing. That book is about escaping your job, but writing for a living is only a very small component.
The image on the right is a man flying and leaving his work clothes behind. The imagery connects very strongly with the message of the book.
You may notice that the picture is very bland right now – the colors don’t pop.
I took the original image and hired someone on Fiverr to change the colors for me. Now I have an image that looks nothing like the original and pops out from the screen.
The original image cost $3 and the color upgrade cost $5.
Not bad for a cover that’s selling like hotcakes.
Hire a Cover Designer
Designing successful book covers is about more than just artistic ability. That is only about ten percent of it.
A good cover designer knows how to block out the page and create eye-pleasing ratios. Your designer will choose the perfect font to connect your book title and cover image in a way that grabs eyeballs.
Your cover should be engaging enough that people click on your book to see more.
Not every cover is a winner. This is the original cover design that I nearly launched my book with. As you can see the image doesn’t really make sense in connection with the topic.
The book would have sold far fewer copies and the majority of my customers would have purchased a different book.
We all make mistakes and it’s important to make a change when that happens. Do not form an emotional attachment to a cover that isn’t working.
I ended up with three different variations of the cover that I really liked. Each of these is amazing in a different way. They all pop from the screen and will grab attention.
The majority of Amazon purchases are made on Kindles in black and white.
A quick test shows me that the purple cover doesn’t work in black and white. Purple and yellow don’t pop in monochrome.
The cover is now small on purpose. When searching around Amazon or on a Kindle, this is how large most people will initially see the cover.
Now the title is nearly unreadable and the entire cover just looks like grey mush.
A good cover needs a high contrast ratio. You want very light and very dark colors that turn into white and black nicely.
The black and white versions of the cover both pop in color and monochrome. Now we have two strong contenders and in the end, it was a flip of the coin.
Both covers are very strong and will sell equally.
I chose the white background because it had slightly more pop here, but the black would have worked just as well.
An incorrectly formatted book is an absolute nightmare on Amazon. To avoid dealing with all of that drama, we want to format your book easily and quickly right out the gate.
You have several formatting options and none of them are free.
You can format your book directly in Scrivener or Word if you want. Both techniques are very technical and not recommended. You can expect to spend several days formatting directly in your Word processor.
The easiest tool is Vellum.
Unfortunately, this software is MAC only right now. On the PC, I recommend using Author Gear to format.
If you really want to format using your word processor, there are some fabulous tutorials online.
I have provided links to them in the resources document.
To format your book in Vellum, you simply import your document and then edit each section. Vellum shows a preview of how your book will look in each different Kindle model as well as the Kindle app.
Vellum shows a preview of how your book will look in each different Kindle model as well as the Kindle app.
The editing process takes less than an hour and you have a beautiful book that you KNOW will look good on every device out there. With this process there is no guesswork or wondering if you messed up a setting.
Create an account at kdp.amazon.com and upload your properly formatted book. Be sure to join KDP Select.
Amazon allows several HTML tags and you can use them to make your book description look beautiful.
The allowed tags include bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, headlines and divider lines. The entire list of tags can be found HERE.
Upload your description, choose your seven best keywords, select the proper categories for your book and then upload your cover an content files.
On the second page, set the initial price for your book at ninety-nine cents.
An incorrectly formatted book is an absolute nightmare on Amazon. To avoid dealing with all of that drama, we want to format your book easily and quickly right out the gate.
You have several formatting options and none of them are free.
You can format your book directly in Scrivener or Word if you want. Both techniques are very technical and not recommended. You can expect to spend several days formatting directly in your Word processor.
The easiest tool is Vellum.
Unfortunately, this software is MAC only right now. On the PC, I recommend using Author Gear to format.
If you really want to format using your word processor, there are some fabulous tutorials online.
I have provided links to them in the resources document.
To format your book in Vellum, you simply import your document and then edit each section. Vellum shows a preview of how your book will look in each different Kindle model as well as the Kindle app.
Vellum shows a preview of how your book will look in each different Kindle model as well as the Kindle app.
The editing process takes less than an hour and you have a beautiful book that you KNOW will look good on every device out there. With this process there is no guesswork or wondering if you messed up a setting.
Create an account at kdp.amazon.com and upload your properly formatted book. Be sure to join KDP Select.
Amazon allows several HTML tags and you can use them to make your book description look beautiful.
The allowed tags include bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, headlines and divider lines. The entire list of tags can be found HERE.
Upload your description, choose your seven best keywords, select the proper categories for your book and then upload your cover an content files.
On the second page, set the initial price for your book at ninety-nine cents.
Amazon is run by a machine. The website ranking structure very rarely involves human interaction. There are over two million books on Kindle alone.
It would take a massive staff to manually check every product and move around search results every day.
Amazon is a machine and machines operate by algorithms.
When you do what Amazon likes in the correct order, you are rewarded with higher rankings and sympathetic traffic.
To get maximum love from Amazon, we follow a very strict pattern.
PHASE 1 – GATHER REVIEWS. During this phase keep your book at 99 cents and give away as many copies as you can to generate honest reviews. When you have 20+ reviews, move to phase two. - PHASE 2 – FREE DAY. You will make your book free for 24-48 hours. During this time you will drive as much traffic as you can to push your book up the rankings.
- PHASE 3 – Transition Back to Paid. During this phase you keep your book at 99 cents for a few days and then slowly raise the price to your ultimate target.
When your book is enrolled in Kindle Select (aka Kindle Unlimited) you can run 5 days of promotion out of every 90.
From the KDP Bookshelf page, click on “Promote and Advertise” next to your book.
Select a day about two weeks from now for your Free Book Promotion.
You need time to prepare your traffic and 2-3 days is simply not enough time.
Many of the places you want to request traffic from will not give you any if your book doesn’t have enough reviews.
There are dozens of websites, Facebook groups and Twitter accounts dedicated to informing people about free and discounted books.
I have prepared a list of these sites for your convenience here – > https://servenomaster.com/announcing-free-kindle-promotion-days/
You want to announce to as many of these sites that your book will be free.
They will manually check your book and then add it to their daily promotion.
Your book will appear in emails, on Facebook pages and all over Twitter during this twenty-four hour period.
FreeBooksy is just one of many great sites that you can find with a simple Internet search.
Each of them has a section for “author submissions.”
Some services charge for their promotions, but many of them are free.
You can manually submit your book to the top freebie sites in a few hours.
It usually takes me 2-3 hours to submit to all of these sites.
When done properly, you will generate 3-5,000 downloads of your book on your free promotion day.
For my promotions, I use Book Marketing Tool. They recently raised the price to $29, which is a little steep.
You can do the job manually in 2-3 hours or you can use their tool to get the job done in about twenty minutes.
You WILL get more downloads when you handle your submissions manually, but this tool is a nice little timesaver.
There is no such thing as too much traffic. If you can afford it, buy as much additional traffic as you can for your promotion and follow-up days.
There are plenty of vendors selling traffic on Fiverr, in addition to the freebie sites you found earlier.
I will buy free book traffic on my promotion day and 99 cent traffic for the following day.
All the downloads on your free day will show that your book is awesome and sales the next day at 99 cents show that people will actually pay for your book.
Amazon’s algorithm LOVES this behavior and your book will skyrocket to the top of the charts!
