At the end of October last year, I booked a Power Date with the magical Lea Woodward to get a helicopter view on what I was doing and where I was going with my business.
One of the outputs of the session was that I should write a book about how to live a charmed life. I started writing the book in December last year.
I didn’t appreciate fully at the time that that business strategy session made the first domino topple over. The book was published in February this year and caused a whole set of other dominoes to topple over effortlessly.
Vicki Wusche started my advanced training programme, Awaken Your Inner Magician, in March – just after my book was published. Within two months, Vicki had learned the secrets of stretching time and channelling her future self.
The result was the publication of her fantastic new book, The New Estate, by the end of April. The book explores the future of the property industry and proposes a new vision for the way we live.
To complement and augment the book, I have developed a suite of self-study programmes for those who want even more magic in their lives. One of the most popular is called Abundant Thinking – and it’s all about money alchemy.
Only a week after launching it, I was pleasantly surprised to see this blog by the wonderful Judith Morgan on how it instantly worked for her – A Spiral of Abundance
Another advanced explorer, Gary Plunkett, has taken the ‘software upgrade for his soul’ with my Awaken Your Inner Magician programme.
As a result of taking the ‘upgrade’, Gary has developed the most remarkable personal and business transformational tool. Learn how we used it to pull things up by their bootstraps in this blog and podcast on The Cube of Light
With the new book, I am doing something I have never done with any of my previous books and that’s to do a proper launch.
What’s remarkable then is that the venue for the launch, chosen ‘at random’ by CompletelyNovel, is exactly the same building in London from which I launched my first business over 30 years ago – there are of course no coincidences.
As well as being a bumper month on my own Zone Show podcast, I’ve also been interviewed nine times. Find out how podcasting sells books and how I switched from the magic of television to the magic of the mind in this eclectic set of recordings
Discover too how to get exposure like this in this podcast with Tina Fotherby of Famous Publicity – PR for the People
A real highlight for me this month was interviewing one of the brightest brains on the planet right now. Find out why Amit Goswami thinks Quantum Economics is so Vital
Another spin off from the ‘New Magic’ book is another self study course called Heart-full Living. It is designed to energise and awaken the chakra system such that the life and people you love just turn up, as if by magic.
Imagine my surprise then when one lady who took it told me that the 4th visualisation around the heart completely freed her from back pain. You gotta love it when that happens !
I will be adding more dominoes to this blog in good time and feel free to add your experiences of magic in your world by way of comment below …
So you’ve written your ebook but how do you get it out to the world and even start making money from it?
Option 1: PDF
Well the simplest way is as it has always been – to create a PDF file. This not only preserves the formatting of you source document but ensures it can’t [easily] be tampered with.
Most word processors have “Save as PDF …” as standard nowadays. If you don’t have one, there are loads of free or cheap plugins and online conversions tools. I won’t list any as they change all the time, just do a Google search.
Armed with a PDF, you can upload it to your site and make it the landing page for a Buy Now button or an email sign up form.
Option 2: Syndicate your PDF
There are many sites where you can now post your PDF to give it a wider readership. Here’s a few with some tips on what they are best used for.
www.bookbuzzr.com – upload PDF (with selective page control) and generate a page turning version of your book you can embed in any site
www.issuu.com – this site allows you to embed selective pages from you book in external websites like Bookbuzzr but more geared to magazine-style formats
www.myebook.com – this site doesn’t do embedding but has the amazing ability to include audio and video. This is a great way to storyboard a book before you convert it to be an Enhanced Edition book for iPad. Myebook also allows you to sell access to your book and make a controlled number of pages free as a sample.
Here’s an example of a free one I did to market test an idea I had for a book on writer’s block called Wordlube
Option 3: ePublish your eBook
The third, and most exciting and profitable method however, is to create an ebook you can sell via one of the online stores like the Amazon Kindle and Apple iBookstore.
As I mentioned in the earlier articles in this series, some years ago a PDF was synonymous with ebook but now an ebook refers to a book you can read on an ereader or iPad. Just to confuse matters, you can read PDF’s on all ereaders and tablets. There is nothing to stop people copying and forwarding ‘PDF ebooks’. If however you convert upload your book to the Amazon Kindle Platform or the Apple iBookstore, they add copy protection in the form of Digital Rights Management.
This means the reader can read it on any of their devices but can’t share it with others. For this service, and others, Amazon and Apple retain 30% of the revenue.
Note that anyone can easily get an account with Amazon Kindle but only publishers of many titles can get Apple iBookstore accounts. The best route for the latter is to use an assisted or traditional publisher or an aggregator like www.smashwords.com or www.lulu.com. Of course, they will take additional margin from sales for providing this service.
There are a few hoops to jump through to professionally format books for ereaders and tablets which anyone with reasonable IT or HTML skills can master.
Alternatively, you may also like to look at a wonderful new UK-based company called CompletelyNovel who have a fab and inexpensive service for both print and ebook publishing.
Finally, if you want your ‘book’ to have real go-faster stripes, you can create a dedicated app for iPhone, iPad or Android. Here you can embed rich functionality by giving the user the ability to interact with the book. For example, you can include user input into the book in the form of journalling or even interaction with the author. Content can also be dynamic where external ‘live’ content such as news feeds or geo-coded information. The limits are ones of imagination and budget.
Also see Do iApp or do iBook? for more information and watch this video which is almost vintage being a year old but still shows some of the possibilities available very well …
Wearing my hat of the Bookwright, I have been talking for a while now about how a book becomes your best business card …
With my book Flavours of Thought, I have surpassed even my own expectations [and advice] and it has lead me into a new area I simply hadn’t planned.
For starters, I didn’t plan to write this particular book last year – it just kind of happened. It was inspired by an eponymous chapter in my book on light bulb moments. In addition, I had for a while being studying the Major Arcana of the Tarot and wanted to write a lay person’s guide to it.
The two themes came together perfectly and the book ended up ‘writing itself’ during a single month last August. I opened my email after finishing the very last recipe in the book only to find a message from a new publishing service called CompletelyNovel. Within a couple of short weeks, I ended up with the book in print and available worldwide for download from the Amazon Kindle Store.
Now that would be a good result for most people in itself – and it was for me too – but the Universe wasn’t finished with me yet. By the time the year was out, I had a training course running teaching people how to concoct their own recipes …
… AND a 1-2-1 karmic mentoring programme that takes people on a tour of the flavours called the Cube of Karma.
To find out more, have a listen to Jackie Walker, the first trained Master Chef on her experience of it all …
Domino 2 : The New Estate
Domino 3 : Abundant Thinking
Domino 4 : The Cube of Light
Domino 5 : One Big Coincidence
Domino 6 : Interviews are like Buses
Domino 7 : Amit Goswami on the Zone Show
Domino 8 : Unexpected Side Effects
So you’ve written your ebook but how do you get it out to the world and even start making money from it?