1000 books published by December 31st?

I have set myself an audacious goal. I want an additional 1000 books published on Amazon by the 31st of December 2018. But how do I do that given that I run a full time business and have children and a house to take care of, as well as having some form of social life?

There are three principles that I apply to everything that I create:

Re-purpose whatever I create into multiple products
Do the work once and get paid for ever
Automate as much as possible

Let me give you a practical example of how you can apply this to your own book publishing business (or anything else you create).

1. Re-purpose whatever I create into multiple products

When I create a journal I will load it onto Amazon as a perfect bound book. Then I will load it onto my Etsy store as a spiral-bound book and a pdf version for digital download..

That is three products for the work of one.

But you can take it a step further. If you have created the pages yourself i.e. not used PLR, you can then convert that journal into single pages and sell them as PLR to other authors and artists to use in their own books. And you can sell it at a slightly higher price because it is a commercial use product.

So now you have four products that are out there with buy buttons on. That’s an efficient use of your time.

2. Do the work once and get paid forever.

Once those books are on Amazon and Etsy, all I need to do is focus on marketing and driving the traffic to the various sites. I never have to work on those books again. They are out there available for sale.

There is another element to this step. You can create multiple variations of exactly the same book, journal or planner by changing two things; the title and the cover.

For instance I have over 40 blank lined journals on Amazon that are identical on the inside. The only difference is the cover. You can do this with any blank book or journal you create because they are notebooks. They are not fiction or non-fiction books which would cause a problem with Amazon. A notebook is a notebook and buyers expect that the interior of the book is going to be similar to any other notebook or journal that is available on the market.

3. Automate as much as possible

Wherever you sell your books, you want the process to be as painless as possible. With Amazon it’s easy. You load the book onto Createspace. Once it is available for sale, Amazon handles the entire buying process. The customer places the order. Amazon sends the order to Createspace. They print the book and then ship it to the customer. You are not involved in the process at all. At the end of the month, you get your royalty payment. You literally make money while you sleep.

With my digital Etsy products, the files are stored on Etsy. The customer buys, the money comes into your Paypal account, and the customer instantly gets a download link for the file. Easy peasy. There is no work required by you.

The only manual process I still have at this stage is when someone orders a spiral-bound book on Etsy. My current supplier does not have a working API that integrates automatically. When I get an order for a physical book on Etsy, I just have to place the order at my printer, then they print and ship to the client. Each time I create a new journal or planner, I load it onto my printer’s site and then place the orders as they come in. It takes about 10 minutes to load each book, but the ordering process is a few minutes work.

Back to the audacious goal.

There are 252 days left until December 31. I sat down and worked out how many books I would have to create a day to reach the goal of an additional 1000 books on Amazon.

252 days minus 36 Sundays (you need to take a break from your business) leaves me with 216 days. Then I divided 1000 by 216 and got to 4,6 books a day. So I rounded it off. I need to produce 5 books a day for the rest of the year.

That’s 30 books a week. Now before you freak out, this is totally doable. Let’s assume it takes you about 30 minutes to create a journal. You can do this very easily by using our Book a Day System templates or by simply creating tables in Word.

Next you have to design the cover. That should take you another 15 minutes. So far we have spent 45 minutes on the journal. Now you get smart. Design another 4 covers for the same journal (15 minutes each). You now have 5 books ready for loading. Total time spent is one hour and 45 minutes. Call it 2 hours.

So for two hours a day of focused work for the next year and you will have a 1000 books available for sale.

You can get even more efficient. Why not focus on one theme a week? Instead of designing a new journal everyday, decide on a theme and do variations of the same book for the rest of the week. You save half an hour a day and you now have 30 books done for the week. That will only take you about one hour each day. Is that feasible for you?

But wait. There’s more!

Do you remember the point I made about re-purposing everything I create? Now you can add ALL those journals you created for the week onto your Etsy store or your own website as spiral-bound books and pdf downloads. That’s an additional 10 products a day or an additional 60 products a week. Each week you could create 90 new books in different formats that have buy buttons on them. And it means that at the end of the year you have 3000 books available in different formats. Do you think it’s worth it?

So who’s with me?

If you are keen to take part in this challenge I have created a document for you to track progress each day and week. You can download it here by clicking on the image below.