How to Become a Best Selling Author w/ Author Paul Rega

About this video

Dale interviews author Paul Rega, presented as an Amazon top 100 best-selling author in fiction and nonfiction. Rega says he began writing in 1993-94 but first published in 2011, when, by his account, Amazon had about 750,000 ebooks. His first book, drawn from his 25 years running an executive search firm, was ‘How to Find a Job When There Are No Jobs.’ He says it initially sold poorly until a famous author friend told him the book was good but the cover and Amazon write-up were terrible; he hired an artist in Italy for a new cover and got help rewriting the description. Rega claims BookBub then picked the book up without him submitting it, producing about 14,000-15,000 free downloads in a couple of days, after which it returned to paid, became the number one job-search/career book for months, and at one point ranked around #300 overall after a later promotion. He explains BookBub as a genre-focused email promotion service that is expensive, highly selective — he says it accepts roughly 10% of submissions — and increasingly contested by large publishers, so acceptance and profit are not guaranteed, though he claims he personally always made money on his runs. He discusses his true-story book ‘Trail of 32,’ about 32 Boy Scouts cycling 1,400 miles from Wood Dale, Illinois to Jacksonville, Florida in 1972, which he says took nearly 10 years and extensive research, interviews, and recovered radio-broadcast tapes. Rega claims a free BookBub run produced about 28,000-30,000 downloads and a later $0.99 run pushed it to #86 overall in the paid store. He also describes the #PDF1 ‘pay it forward’ hashtag group of 17 authors who promoted each other’s books, and closes by advising new authors to keep writing, have a mission rather than chase trends, and learn how to sell their books.

Key takeaways

• Rega attributes his first book’s turnaround to replacing a weak cover with a professional one and rewriting the Amazon description — presentation affected whether promoters and readers took the book seriously.
• BookBub is described as a genre-targeted email promotion service that is selective and costly, with free runs cheaper than $0.99 runs, and big publishers now compete for the same slots.
• Rega claims high-volume free promotions (tens of thousands of downloads) can lift a book’s Amazon ranking and algorithm placement, with residual paid sales after the promotion being the real payoff.
• He says hitting the paid top 100 took on the order of a couple thousand sales during a promotion, plus continued promotion on Facebook, Twitter, and other services to sustain momentum.
• His closing advice: keep writing even when you don’t feel like it, work from a mission you care about rather than following trends, and learn marketing because even traditionally published authors must sell their own books.

Episode details: published October 6, 2017 · 39:58 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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