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116: Writing a Book and Amazon Marketing with Chandler Bolt

About this Episode

Chandler Bolt is the author of Book Launch: How to Write, Market & Publish Your First Bestseller in Three Months or Less AND Use it to Start and Grow a Six Figure Business. He is also the founder of Self Publishing School, one of the most successful online training programs for authors.

Chandler was a C level English student who hated writing. In the last three years he has published six books. He decided to write a book with a friend from college about his experiences running a business and going to school full-time.

The book went from idea to bestseller on Amazon and just under three months. Chandler dropped out of school shortly thereafter and the royalties from the book paid the bills. It continues to bring in thousands of dollars a month in passive income.

We had an intense conversation packed with information. In this interview Chandler shares his 3 Step System for Writing a Book, we talk about amazon marketing, hiring employees, and much more. Here are the highlights:

Writing a Book: Chandler Bolt’s 3 Step System

Step 1: Mind Map

First, write your book idea down in the middle of a white piece of paper. Next, write down everything you know, or can think of about your book topic. You’ll use that brainstorm diagram to create a mind map where you group related ideas into sections of your book. You want to organize your book into 4 – 7 sections. Now that you have your ideas organized into sections, the next step is to arrange the sections in a logical order for your book.

Step 2: Decide on Chapters

Once you have your sections in a logical order is time to drill down further and decide on chapter subjects. After you have your chapter subjects, the next step is to mind map each individual chapter and then make a point by point outline of your chapter so that you can create your book quickly and easily.

3. Write the book

Armed with your detailed outline its time to write the book. You can either use your detailed outline to go point by point and write your manuscript, or you can dictate your manuscript into a digital voice recorder using your point by point outline and have that file transcribed. (You can also use voice recognition software and do the same thing.)

Tips For Writing A Book

Understand that your mind map and outline are not set in stone. They are a starting place that help you organize your thoughts around your book idea.
Co-authoring a book is like trying to paint one painting with two hands on the paintbrush.
The most important thing a new writer can do is to set a deadline for a rough draft.
Have someone who can keep you accountable.
Publicly announce your rough draft completion date so that your publicly accountable as well.
After you complete your first rough draft, you begin to believe that it’s possible that you will publish a book
There are a few advantages to speaking your book rather than writing your book.
It’s usually faster.
If talking comes easier to you than writing, your ideas will flow more freely and your manuscript will read like a conversation with your audience.
As a side note, if you dictate your book you won’t have to worry about spelling typos.
It’s important that you mind map and outline your book beforehand so that you can keep track of where you are and what you’re talking about when you’re dictating.
It’s really easy to go off on a tangent when you’re dictating into a recorder or microphone without a plan.

3 Types of Creators When it Comes to Writing a Book:

1. The researcher — the person who meticulously researches a topic or story idea.
2. The “0 to Draft” person — The person who writes into the dark
3. The editor — the person who polishes the draft into a final product.

Play to your strengths. With the Internet is really easy to find people to partner with who can do the parts of the process that you don’t want to.

Hiring Employees

1. Create a job scorecard — this is where you create a job description, decide on the key indicators of performance, and drill down to the type of person who would be best fitted for that job.
2. Source the right candidates — this is a numbers and quality game.
3. Select the best candidate — this is where you choose your employee
4. Sell them on working for you — chances are if there were a really good candidate they’re going to have plenty of job offers.

Amazon Marketing

Amazon is a buyer search engine. It functions like Google, but Amazon’s audience is interested in buying books and other products.

Do keyword research, figure out how people can find your book by searching Amazon. Do an Amazon search using the keywords you’re targeting. Look at what books are ranking for those keywords. Look at their sales rank and reviews. Create a launch team for your book. Reviews are important to Amazon’s search engine, and a launch team will eat you a number of good reviews on or before for your launch date which will help with Amazon’s algorithm. Reviews also help with social proof.

The Review Sweeper: A Proven Ethical Way to Get More Reviews

Chandler has an autoresponder sequence set up so that any time you buy one of his books through his website, you will get an e-mail about three weeks later asking you if you liked the book. If you respond positively to that e-mail a member of his support team will send out a form letter, personalized to you asking you to copy and paste your positive response into an Amazon review. If you don’t respond to his first e-mail asking for a review he will send two more e-mails. The third e-mail just explains that Amazon reviews are extremely helpful and if you can spare the time he’d really appreciate it. If not no worries.

How to Launch Your Book on Amazon

When you launch a book on Amazon it’s really important to know why you’re writing the book. Are you writing the book to:
1. Get sales and make money.
2. Get leads and build an e-mail list.
3. Drive your audience to a high-end product.
4. Some combination of these.
5. A different reason

You want to begin with the end in mind because your end goal will determine all of your marketing decisions.

Published: The Proven Path from Blank Page to Published Author by Chandler Bolt – A Case Study

Published has two Main goals:

1. Getting leads from self-publishing school
2. Building Chandler’s authority in the space.

Because these are Chandler’s goals he isn’t as concerned about how to maximize revenue from this book. He wants to get as many leads as possible into his sales funnel for his self-publishing school, and he wants to position his books so that gives him greater authority within the market.

Because those are Chandler’s goals for his book he’s publishing guest posts on other blogs, because guest posts and podcasts drive SEO for his publishing school and the book.

Chandler is also sending a number of paperback books to influencers in his market.

Marketing Tips for Authors

If you want to be a better salesperson and make more money with your writing you have to learn psychology, persuasion, and sales.
Learn copywriting. Copywriting is salesmanship in print.
Choose your categories on Amazon so that you can get into two overarching categories. Each individual category will have its own traffic.
Choose less competitive categories so that you can stay in the top five for your categories.
60% to 70% of all sales in that category go to the top five books in that category.
It is easier to sell a pain reliever than a vitamin.
Position your book as a pain reliever and you will sell more books.
Marketing is only about how you sell the product. The product itself doesn’t need to change. You can change the product description of your book on Amazon so that appeals to your audiences pain point and keep the book in itself the same.

Books and Resources Mentioned in the Interview

Book Launch: How to Write, Market & Publish Your First Bestseller in Three Months or Less AND Use it to Start and Grow a Six Figure Business — Chandler’s Amazon best-selling book. That title says it all.

Published: The Proven Path from Blank Page to Published Author — Chandler’s newest book will take you from idea through publication.

Self Publishing School — Chandler’s business website packed with free articles on self-publishing. You could also become one of Chandler’s clients and learn how to create your book and how to market it so that it achieves what you want it to.

Who by Jeff Smart — a book about the the hiring process

Jon Carlton’s simple writing system course — a complete course on copywriting.

Influence by Robert Cialdini — a great book on human psychology —

How to build an email list and Launch Team with Bryan Harris — An interview Chandler did with Bryan Harris that talks about how to build a Launch Team and email list

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