Today we geek out with Rocky Callen, bestselling novelist, who successfully turned a profit from publishing books. Rocky shares her best tips on how to create a quality book, become a paid bestseller, and do it all with integrity.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:23 – Introduction.
• 06:45 – One thing that Rocky sees often with people who want to write a book and make it the centerpiece of their business is they think I am going to crank it out and I am going to slap it up online and that they are going to be a best-selling person but it doesn’t work that way, people underestimate the time and energy it requires to make a book that is meaningful, impactful and actually draws in your tribe. Your book is an extension of your business so want to give it that time, heart, energy that it requires so that means making sure that when you are looking at your book, you are taking your reader on a journey and that reader needs to be your ideal client and you want to make sure that there is emotion, information and everything in it that you bring to your clients in your sessions or in your retreats or however you serve them .  You want to bring your reader on that journey so want to make sure you edit the book including developmental editing which is when a person goes and looks at all the holes, the flow, consistency  and potency and tells you what you need to fix and then you go into line editing where you start to get to the nitty gritty of grammar and then you go into proofing which is the ultimate polish and this is the writing side. 
• 09:08 – Find a quality designer for the cover of your book because your book is going to be on Amazon or on bookshelves and it needs to capture the attention of people scrolling by, it needs to stand up to the competition. If your book looks like it’s been half assed, it won’t sell and the tribe won’t come to you and the clients won’t come to you because instead of being this epic and phenomenal way of exalting your brand, it diminishes it. So one must invest in a cover that is an extension of your brand and that reflects the way the book makes a reader feel you should be consistent with your branding from your business all the way through your book and invest the time and energy to make sure that happens.
• 12:36 – Rocky says that when you write a book well, by the end whatever your core message or mission is they are going to turn to you for that because they’ve invested hours of their life at that point because they have been so entertained or so informed or so motivated or so inspired by you and they know you at an intimate and personal level for example when you think about marketing and you are writing Facebook posts or a blog post you might write 500 or a thousand words per post but when you are writing a  book you are looking at thirty thousand to seventy five thousand words and that’s a lot of information and a lot of  story so when someone comes to that end point with you and you’ve taken them on that journey effectively, they have no choice but to keep going with you and that’s where you have the impact. So you must put your all into the book writing process and the branding process and then market like a nerd.
• 14:10 – If you know what the book is in your heart and you have the title and you know what it is then you should publicize it on social media and say I am writing a book and share with them the behind the scenes of the writing process, people will get very intrigued by that and that is book marketing without feeling like marketing and you don’t need a huge budget for that.
• 15:55 – You can create a wait list for your book and give them some bonuses for joining the wait list but they also get to see the behind the scenes of the book and that becomes your warm list of buyers and that should be a separate list from your bigger list because these people are invested already in the book itself.
• 16:24 – When you are looking at marketing you want to make sure that when you focus your efforts, your promotion, your guest posts and your partnerships with other people to promote you, you want to focus your energy on the first 72 hours of release because what happens is that people do a post weekly but how Amazon calculates bestsellers is they want to see mass quantity downloaded in a specific period of time and you have the best chance of really nailing that in those first 72 hours because that’s when the excitement and the buzz can really go so really focus all your time and energy there so that you give yourself the best chance to climb those lists. Being on a list means that you are more visible and in the end, that’s all that you want to be visible.
• 18:43 – You’ll see this a lot with entrepreneurs,  people that buy the most for 72 hours a lot of times get amazing bonuses paired with the book purchase so if you buy the book and you send in the receipt to the list and you might get an eight week course or something like that.
• 19:55 – You must give readers many different ways to engage with you and your brand like contests, giveaways, Facebook lives, Facebook events because all these things amp up the energy.
• 20:33 – A lot of people think that the book is going to make you a lot of money but for entrepreneurs, the money isn’t actually in book sales but from upsells so what you must try to do is create something that is so perfectly paired with the book that when they finish your book they are like oh what’s next, I need something right now, I need to go deeper or I need to go further whatever it is, however your book is set up and it could be a downloadable program or something entry level and that’s when you pull them through your whole funnel. You want to make sure that there’s something that’s beautifully and perfectly tied with your book so that way they want to dive in and they are willing to go and spend the money so that they are leaning in closer and closer so that when your fifteen-thousand-dollar offer comes up they go for it without thinking twice and that’s where you really make your money.
• 27:32 – Rocky says that you must look at every twenty-four-hour period of time and within every hour try to get on a webcast and get people to start buying because the Amazon algorithm is recalculated every hour so the more you push every hour the better your chances. It really depends on your category because even within business depending on who you are competing with because if a big name in the business is launching, they are going to radically change the game in terms of who gets to compete with them versus when a big name isn’t launching. So when you are looking at your launch dates you should look at what other books are launching if there are five other huge names launching then that means that it is probably going to be thousands more for you to get even on the top one hundred list. If you are just looking at the top one hundred list but you are not looking at spot number one then a few thousand on your first seventy two hours is going to get you somewhere on the list in general but it depends on the category and how many people come through in each hour and who you are competing against but that’s a good way to aim for it and try to go for that.
• 29:19 – Rocky does not feel it is appropriate for you to allow people to download your book for free for the first seventy-two hours and she would not consider it to be a best seller. She considers it to be a best seller only if it is in the paid list and you are next to the big names.  But one thing that is possible and potentially helpful is if you do the seventy-two-hour free offer you get people to buy and leave reviews and then immediately after that that’s when you hit it hard with marketing.
• 31:00 – When you are looking at categories there are many subcategories but you must look at the ones that have the least number of books because that means less competition and see what that word is and use it as one of your keywords as that makes it more likely for you to be placed in that category. And another tip is when you are looking at the top one hundred in a specific list, in a specific category click on the number one and the number ten and at the bottom when you go to product descriptions it is going to say rank 233 which means they are selling thousands that day and if they are going to rank five thousand then they are selling maybe a hundred or less. So you must see the gap between number one and number ten and that gives you an idea in this category,  number one is ranked ten thousand but in this category, its best-selling rank number two of all of Amazon so you must look at those ranks and then use those keywords when you are uploading your book so that way you know you have a better chance of  getting squarely in front of your audience  and really maximizing your chance for success in terms of being a bestseller.

Resources Mentioned:

• Rocky is very active on the Facebook group TheBleedInkTribe and this group is for women who want to write their books and publish them. Rocky has designers, editors and some awesome people in there.
• RockyCallen.com/Bleed-Ink-Checklist -- You can get a free check list for going from book idea to book launch.