Joe Konrath is one of the authors at the forefront of the ebook revolution.

How did he get there? By working his ass numb at the typewriter / computer and getting printed in 2001. He then worked his feet numb by doing many book signings across the country. Now? He is sharing tips for how to take advantage of the ebook craze – preaching involvement in Amazon’s Kindle and SmashWords projects.

What was Joe saying about “ebooks” 5 years ago on his blog?

Basically, he thought they were going to take off.

Here is one of Joe’s posts from 5 years back – “Ebooks!” ->

The post shows Joe was thinking about ebooks 5 years ago – by giving 2 of his books away for free on his blog. He was also already marketing himself like a madman – in any way he could.

Why is that important?

Because this is the model you could be using today. If you ever hope to make it as an author – you’ll need to market yourself exhaustively, and hit every channel you can – using every opportunity to give it your best effort to help someone find your books, or like them once they do find them.

A five-year plan is NOT THAT LONG to change your entire life.

What were you doing 5 years ago?

Me? I was in Thailand like I am now. I was wondering – what the hell am I going to do in Thailand to make a lot of money and support myself and payoff debts from the past?

I did start blogging back in 2006. I started a few blogs – ThaiPulse.com, AimforAwesome.com, and then a handful of blogs on Blogger.com that went basically nowhere. Over the past few years I’ve written 20+ books, wrote thousands of posts on blogs I own, created 280+ videos at youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/thaipulsedotcom), and read a lot about technology, marketing, ebooks, and anything else I thought would help me get to where I want to be.

Though five-years ago I had book ideas in my head, and had even started some – writing 50 pages on a couple of books – I just never got going whole hog. I didn’t see that ebooks were going to kill it later. I sure didn’t think of myself as a writer that could sell enough books to keep me and my family alive.

Now, five-years later and I’m on the verge of something. If I could just slap the side of my head hard enough to shake shit up – and yet, not destroy my creative gray mush – I could go full-throttle and start banging out good books. Soon I’d be cranking out great books. You know what? If only one time in the next 20 years of writing I nail it and write a blockbuster (netbuster) – we’ll all sit at our favorite paid fishing lake drinking Beerlao and putting catfood and bread on hooks for the monster catfish.

Hell, we might even go see Chiang Mai – the only place in Thailand we’ve never come close to.

The time is NOW.

Waking the hell up and realizing that today is the start of the next 5 years – is in order. I’m hitting you with it right now. You can’t ignore it.

Piece a plan together, and start hammering it out – working on your writing and marketing yourself everydamnday for the next 5 years – I think you can be successful. Hell, I think non-writers could be successful too. I wasn’t a writer by any means. I was a thinker… not a writer. Now I’m trying to do something with all the thinking going on. Something useful. I tired of firing off nerve impulses that got lost in the space of my head, not doing any good for anybody – including me.

If you’re a writer on ANY level – you can make it work. I know you can. There’s nobody reading this that cannot make it happen.

Just go.

Guys like Joe are 5 years ahead of you. Today Joe is selling some ungodly number of ebooks per day – 600+ I think it is. I get bored reading how many thousands of dollars he is making a month, but I think it’s something like $20,000+. That’s USD folks.

In 5 years you’ll either be looking back at 2011 – 2016 as the best time you ever spent on yourself…

Or, you’ll be looking ahead to 2021 as the date when you finally pull it all together.

Me?

I’ll be absolutely killing it by 2016.

Write that down.

I’ll be KILLING IT I said!

New Amazon Kindle Fire Color Multitouch Tablet – eReader:

New Amazon Kindle Touch eReader:

New Amazon Kindle eReader:

The first things I started selling online were “FatBurners” in 1997 or 1998 – I forget which. I saw a guy selling them on Ebay and I found a good source for the stuff wholesale – and started selling unreal numbers of bottles at $9.95 per bottle, $19.95 for 3 bottles.

I brought my brother in on it because I just couldn’t do it all myself. He packed orders and I packed orders – during our free time, as we worked other jobs.

I’ve been selling online ever since – and I strongly recommend you do too.

I have many friends that sell products and services online.

You know – with the recession and junk economy and all – everyone was hurting – right?

Nope. Not us. In fact, nobody I know well – was hurting at all. Last month we had our biggest month here – all things considered, and we’re looking forward to probably doubling that rather easily by the start of 2012 – regardless what the economy does.

People STILL buy stuff during a recession and depression.

If you write books – you can see that for yourself.

People that have been unaffected by the economy – are buying stuff at the same rate they always were. There’s been no downturn in plenty of areas of online business. Many upturned instead.

Figure out what you’re going to sell – and get to work building a website for it. Make it a WordPress site for god’s sakes, don’t waste a fooking minute with Blogger like most of the writers I know are doing.

Over the past two weeks we found a source for one of our retail sites… we spent about $600 USD buying products to sell. Guess how much we’ll get back from selling them when they’re all gone in 9-12 months?

Depending if we resell any wholesale to anyone – which we might do for a quick profit – we’ll make between $17,500 and $25,000.

Markup is a wonderful thing – right?

On the fat burners I think we pulled in $1,800 in 12 days when we realized – holy shite, we don’t want to do this for our jobs! Packing boxes and keeping track of orders and lost packages? Forget that noise… lets go back to earning $60-70K working for the man.

I wasn’t so bright back then.

How much would it have run us to hire a student to pack boxes for a few hours per day?

We’d have profited nicely.

Oh well, right.

The point is – retail – selling something online, is a major source of revenue for a LOT of people. Figure out what you’re going to sell and kick it’s ass.

I think it’s Alibaba.com that lists wholesale resources for just about everything under the sun. They’re in China or India – and have THOUSANDS of wholesalers with stuff to sell you. You’ve gotta take a chance to make something work.

When you’re waiting for your books to start shaking up the world – sell something online and make some income at the same time.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a vacation that lasted more than 1 week. A very long time. Of course, if you wanted, you could call my life a vacation for the last 6 years. It does resemble that sometimes. If only you knew how I’ve had to break my mind like a bucking bronco gets broken in. I’ve finally done it. I can do many things I’ve never been able to do before – having much more control over raging ADHD/ADD now.

This started out to be a move across the country, and instead has turned into a long vacation. It’s still going on. I thought I’d finish books and get others going strongly. Nope. Today we hit an awesome waterfall (Huai Chan) on the border of Thailand and Cambodia, and ate at my wife’s aunt’s home for dinner. Fresh fish, rice, and papaya. MMMM mmm.

Thailand’s northeast is in that perfect weather pattern right now… no rain. No heat. No freezing cold… just sunshine and nice cool air. We’re looking forward to moving on – but, not sure when that will be. Another month?

Yes, we’re moving on – this is not the place to live for the next 17 years. We’ll look at a couple more spots and make a decision shortly. Of primary importance – where to raise little princess Mali?

When was the last time you had 31 days of vacation? This is only possible because we have online projects that pay us whether we’re doing anything or not.

Start writing books in a niche – as fast as you can. Amazon Kindle’s glory days are not going to last forever. Build something there before the rest of humanity jumps in with both feet – because then it’s too late. I really think that. For most people you’ll need to get in now and bust your hump… and then you’ll be able to fight through all the competition that is coming.

Ok then – back to reading about the new Motorola Xoom tablet with Android Honeycomb.

I was trying to comment on JA Konrath’s blog – a Blogger.com, junk blog, when it killed my entire request by saying the comment was too long!

If I want to write 6 pages I should be able to, right? I’m adding value to his site. This is what I mean about Blogger and WordPress.com blogs – they are entirely effing ridiculous and not helping authors in the least.

If you’re on one of those lame platforms, you’ve gotta get off and see the light man. WordPress.org or some other serious blogging platform is a MUST DO.

First off, you don’t even OWN YOUR OWN DOMAIN with blogger.com or wordpress.com.

If Blogger decides they’re going to fold – your blog must be moved somewhere. If blogger kills a feature you liked – well, that’s life. Blogger and WordPress.com are in TOTAL CONTROL of what you have… your “business” is all wrapped up in how they run their blogging platforms.

How can you call yourself a writer with a business when you’re renting free space for your blog that you can’t even will to your family when you die?

Funny that I was telling Joe Konrath that he has to get the hell off Blogger.com and get a real blog when this snafu happened and my comment died – lost in space. Luckily – well, it’s smart really, because I’ve been farked about 100 times with losing long chunks of text I’ve written, I control-A’ed and copied it before I hit the publish button. So now it becomes part of my blog, not his.

Comment to Joe Konrath, which he’ll not see because his blog platform sucks:

God Joe, I’d love to get you off this blogger system and into a real blog.

I took your advice and dropped my $9.99 prices to $2.99 at Amazon Kindle as well as at the couple of ebook sites I own. The results over the last 10 days show that I sold just over 3 times as many ebooks during most 10 day periods prior. Sure this is just 10 days. So, income will be about the same.

I agree with Joe’s long-term strategy of selling for $2.99 because as a writer is becoming known, it is far better to sell more books than it is to make more money. Out of 13 books I have now, only 5 are selling consistently. The other 7 I am seriously considering making free – as they sell so little that the value to me is in reaching new readers in higher numbers. Otherwise – they reach only the couple people per month that buy them for $2.99.

What I believe most ebook writers need to be concerned with most right now – when thinking about the long-term – is how in the world do you convert Amazon customers to YOUR customers.

Though I’ll sell 100+ books at Amazon this month they give me no lead information. I don’t know who bought my books. I don’t know where they live. I don’t know m/f. I don’t know age, occupation, anything. I can’t email them to tell them I just released a new ebook. I can’t email them to say – “Hey, you just bought your 3rd book, here’s a free ebook.”

The best long-term strategy for becoming a successful writer with a business of your own in which you control as much as possible is to convert some (as many as possible) of those people buying your books at Amazon to be your people.

Writers with blogger and wordpress.com blogs don’t even own their own domain. This is an absolute essential. I can’t help think – 2nd class, when I see someone on blogger.com or wordpress.com. The blogs are harder to read and the templates suck.

Take control of your writing career. Change every variable over time so YOU control them.

Selling a book on my site I earn $2.99. Selling at Amazon I earn a dollar less. If Amazon changes and starts the 35% commission option again – I’d need to live with it. Then I’m making $1 on my $3 book.

If Joe plays his cards right he can start converting readers at Amazon to readers of his personal blog – at a real domain name, and have his own customers. Right now he’s building up the customer base for Amazon, not Joe.

Having the customer data is THE most important thing…

Get started with Aweber.com and start collecting lead information so you have the legal right to email people that are interested in your ebooks. Otherwise, you’ll be sucking Amazon’s teat for the next 20 years instead of being in control.

WordPress.org blogs are not difficult to setup and write at. They offer a lot more flexibility, and, over the long-term… you need it!

(Photo from kaens at Flickr.com)

One thing I’ve noticed over the years and more so now as gaggles of writers are deciding to give it a shot and crank out ebooks? The one thing that matters the most, far beyond all else – is the story.

If you’re writing fiction – there is nothing more important than a really amazing, unique, and interesting story. I’ve read maybe 40 of the top selling books at Amazon and it smacked me in the head today. An amazing plot is the best possible thing you could focus on when writing your fiction book. You should probably spend long hours crafting a masterpiece of a story before getting started writing the book.

How long did it take for Thomas Harris to create the whole Hannibal Lecter story? I’m guessing months.

There are many writers in the world. There are writers that write like every other writer with perfect grammar, tense, punctuation, and all that. They do well when they have a good story to tell. There are writers like me that are more focused on the emotional tone of the book – the hard hitting, dramatic parts, and don’t care that much about the proper rules of writing. If the masses don’t care – what do I care? The meat that matters, is the story. If writers like me have a good story to tell – they kick ass in sales just like the first group of writers.

What I’m saying is… writers used to be a dime a dozen. In this new digital book age, writers are a dime a thousand.

We’re lucky to have a lack of competition at the moment at places like Amazon’s digital Kindle books. Writers that have written great paperback books can’t even sell them online at Amazon because they signed away their digital rights to the paperback publishers. Over the next 5 years those writers will have smartened up (most of them) and will start writing for online publishing and keeping their digital publishing rights.

When they do, the competition is going to get fierce. In 5-10 years when everyone in the world that ever thought of writing a book, realizes they can, there will be a glut of books online. We thought there was a glut of paperback books and the competition was tough before?

Soon it will be much, much worse.

And guess what? Those writers with awesome stories to tell are going to still be killing it. Those writers with perfect grammar, punctuation, syntax, and spelling – but no great stories? They’ll be writing for themselves because nobody will read it. I’m writing this post because all I see at writer’s blogs are articles about how to write perfect sentence structure. How to spell commonly misspelled words. My professor cared about sentence structure. Spell-check cares about misspelled words.

When you write – write to make an impact on people. Your story must make an impact. Your writing style, the tone of your writing, these must make an impact. Your cover, description, and reviews should all make an impact.

Your writing skills beyond being able to write at an A level in college? Don’t spend a minute worrying about it.

Why?

Because 90% of all readers can’t tell what is right or wrong English anyway. The masses don’t have any idea what is proper and what isn’t.

Are you writing books for writers, or writing for readers? Before ebooks you had no choice – you wrote for writers. You were writing for an agent and publisher because they had to approve your book before it ever got published. That piece of the puzzle is completely gone now. Forget writing for agents.

I write for readers. If writers get anything out of what I write in my books, that’s a plus.

If not?

I’m still able to sleep 3 minutes after my head hits the pillow. Writers are not the focus, or even a consideration when I write.

Monstrous ideas, and solid follow through… getting the books written is what is important. Most of the blogs at writing.alltop.com are about how to follow the rules of writing.

I say forget about the rules and write for readers. If you’re writing for academics – then follow the strictest criteria. If not, fuggetaboutit.

Please, if you will… bow your heads for three minutes with me please and let’s chant together…

Out with the old.
In with the new.
Story, story, story, story…

(Repeat 27x, gradually increasing in volume and tempo and finishing with a pounding crescendo of STORY STORY STORY like the Animal House toga party chant Belushi screamed, TOGA TOGA TOGA. Anyone remember that, or did I just date myself right out of readership? Kids, if you haven’t seen that movie, look through your parents VHS tapes and wonder what it was like living in the Golden Age of Awesome. )

Freelance writers don’t know where to focus.

Look at the long-term.

Do you want to:

1. Write for someone else the rest of your life?

2. Write for yourself for the rest of your life?

From there it gets really easy what you should be focusing on. I’m going to guess than NOBODY wants to write for someone else the rest of their lives. There are people that do, but they are anomalies and we don’t care about them. We care about us, and WE want to write for ourselves because… well, we’re all sorts of intelligent over here in this camp.

What is the path to being able to write for yourself as a long-term goal?

There are many paths, this is the one I’m suggesting everyone jump on as fast as you can.

1. Take a pulling-no-punches look at yourself. Are you a writer? Can you write? Have others said they LOVE how you write? Have you written something that has been read many times – 1,000? 10,000? 1 million times? Did you get great feedback on it? Or, are you someone that is dedicated to becoming a great writer?

There are writers that have it already, and there are writers that can get it after a lot of work. If you’re not one of those two people, choose another profession.

2. Forget writing articles that you hope to sell. It isn’t scalable. By writing one article and shopping it around, you are wasting heaps of time that you could be spending doing other things that are more productive.

3. Do write articles that get you noticed. Find top bloggers that are in the same niche that you want to write about. Create 5 titles of provocative, new, or cool articles that you offer to the blog owner and ask her if you could write one of them as a guest blogger there. Be ready to show prior articles as samples of your writing. Ideally you’d have your own blog, but not really necessary.

Write the hell out of that article and submit it. Your story will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people over time. And, you’ll get a link back to your website where you can start building a list of email subscribers using Aweber.com’s list-building service.

4. Write your own books. The world of book writing has just changed remarkably. Today I can write a 15,000 word book and sell it for $9.95 at Amazon or $29.95 at Clickbank.com or websites across the world if it’s a groundbreaking book with more information than anyone else has on a small niche topic.

When I say, “Write your own books” – I mean ebooks. Books, paper books, are dead. Don’t write another paper book in your life. Paper books are old, they are too long, they are a waste of paper, time, money, ideas, and they’re not the future. Switch now.

5. Keep writing your own books and selling them. Try hard to know who your customers are so you can send them notices of future books being released – which they may also buy. Build your brand. The more people that hear about you – the better you’ll do. You can do well being an asshole or a saint. You should probably choose which – now.

If you are going to be a writer, write for yourself. There is nothing more rewarding in life – career wise, than producing something unique and having other people that appreciate it – buy it.

Writing your own books and putting them up for sale gives you residual income where you are doing nothing but watching sales come into your email box. It makes for a glorious day when I wake up in the morning after 7 hours of sleep and see 10 book sales in my email. What makes it better is knowing that I’ll continue to get sales for the next couple years off those same books. The rate of sales may increase or decrease – but, I’ll make sales. Also, I know I can do many things to increase the rate of sales… it’s within my power to make myself a winner.

Strive to be a writer for yourself – not for corporations, not for search engines.

I did about 29 things today, and yet the only two questions that really matter are:

How much did I write today?

How well did I write today?

How much? About average, which is maybe 4,000 words. If I write 4,000 words  I give myself an “A”. It matters not whether what I wrote is publishable, for this question the only thing that mattters is quantity. What matters is that I wrote 4,000 words.

So, my average day is an “A” level effort in my own opinion. If you’re shooting for a “C” then you’re not all that into what you’re doing and maybe writing isn’t for you. Maybe you should take up internet marketing like everyone else that can’t write. Format resumes or something. Be honest with yourself. You should be able to regularly come up with “A” grades.

How well did I write today? I wrote some blog posts, some comments, and some email. It’s 7:30 pm and I haven’t written anything for my books yet. So, right now I’m doing OK – but not awesome. I gave myself a “-”.

In my mind this A- isn’t acceptable and now I know I’m going to write some in the books tonight. It’s not OK to go to sleep knowing I’m at an A-. It’s not what I’ve allowed myself to do. I’ve got to put that grade in my Google Calendar if I don’t make it right tonight. I don’t like to see any A- days in the calendar.

If you grade yourself for the day well before you are ready to quit, then you’re able to salvage the day and make it not just a good day, but an awesome day.

Strive for awesome days. Give yourself the motivation to have awesome days. Give yourself the kick in the ass to have awesome days. (Did I use ass yet in this post?) It’s a frustrating obsessive compulsive practice, this getting the ass in every post. Call it a character fault.

How’d you do today – what is your grade based on these two easy questions?