Self Publishing Blueprint Review (2023): Don’t Buy Emeka’s Course Without Reading This Brutally Honest Review

The Man Behind The Course

Emeka Ossai has hit the ground running when it comes to his self publishing content.

He’s the go-to guy for the outsource self publishing community.

The outsource community is made up of publishers who prefer to outsource their books to ghostwriting companies than writing books themselves.

Self Publishing Blueprint (SPB) is tailored towards outsource publishing.

What You’ll Learn In My Self Publishing Blueprint

The course lessons, by Emeka Ossai, are as long as they need to be (short and to the point) and exclude fluff.

Module 1: How to Pick Your Niche

In this module, Emeka breaks down the difference between both a niche and a keyword beautifully.

The central theme throughout this module is that you’ll be choosing one niche and focusing your publishing efforts on it.

Once you’ve selected your niche, Emeka Ossai gives you a criteria for choosing profitable keywords.

He has a video on the criteria and explains how you can check the profitability of keywords efficiently with KDSpy (aka Kindle Spy).

The criterion is based on checking the top books of a given keyword – specifically checking their Amazon Best Seller Ranking.

You’ll then learn about Keyword Stacking strategy of publishing books.

After the stacking strategy lesson comes a lesson on assessing your competitors.

This lesson is vital to understand and implement – otherwise, you won’t compete in the Kindle publishing business for long.

Key Takeaways From Module 1

• Pick one niche.
• Find profitable keywords that will be book titles.
• Publish your books strategically.
• Outwork your competitors.

Module 2: Creating Your Book

I can appreciate the overview of this module. Emeka Ossai starts off stating that beginners should stick to ghostwriting companies at first.

Ghostwriting companies vet their writers, so you don’t have to, which, as a beginner, saves your momentum.

Book length, book title & book description guidelines, formatting your KDP manuscript,  your book cover, and more are covered.

Key Takeaways From Module 2

• Don’t hiring freelance writers until you grasp the publishing process.
• Have longer books for more royalties.
• Be specific when outsourcing.

Module 3: Publishing Your Book On KDP

The lessons here similar to other courses, but what I liked was the last lesson: Creating a Description That Sells.

This video lesson isn’t taught by Emeka, but by a student of My Self Publishing Blueprint named Oliver.

He’s a copywriter and covers the fundamentals of copyrighting and how to implement them in your Kindle books’ Amazon description section.

Key Takeaways From Module 3

• How to publish a book on KDP.
• Copyrighting is an overlooked skill that can boost conversions.

Module 4: Publishing Your Paperback Book

Here, you’re going to learn precisely how to have your paperback version of your book on your book’s Kindle page.

Most of this is outsourced work and uploading files to Createspace (this is now handled on KDP) – all steps are covered well.

I don’t recommend skipping this step, by the way. It’s the income stream that will top your royalty charts.

This is especially true if you follow the lesson “Pricing For Your Paperback,” where Emeka Ossai covers how to price your book overtime strategically. Plus, some tricks on profiting more from your paperbacks.

As an outsource publisher, you’ll typically always start off publishing your Kindle book first and paperback second.

Key Takeaways From Module 4

• Paperback books are where most of your royalties will come from – don’t skip this step.
  

Module 5: Ranking Your Book and Getting Reviews

Ah, the hardest section of this review to write.

This is where you’re going to learn, if you so choose to, how to get reviews for your books via virtual assistants (VA’s).

If you’re thinking about buying Self Publishing Blueprint, an outsource self publishing course; you should know the nature of this course.

Welcome to the Dark Arts of Book Promotion.

Courses like My Self Publishing Blueprint and the majority of the outsource Kindle publishing community view review swapping as a necessary evil.

Quite frankly you won’t get very far without them if you don’t have an existing audience. After all, verified reviews are part of Amazon’s ranking algorithm.

At the same time, it is against KDP’s review policies, and you potentially risk your account getting shut down or suspended.

In these lessons, Emeka Ossai explains the A-Z process of how to get reviews for your books without leaving any footprints.

He also emphasizes a speed of implementation which is crucial if you’re going to partake in this dark magic.

I like Emeka’s central message in this module. Review swaps should only be done once and are done to help your book rank.

After that, you should focus on white hat strategies like building an email list, and creating perma-free books.

Key Takeaways From Module 5

• Getting reviews ASAP plays an important role on your book ranking.
• Reviews should only be gathered once per book and then white hat strategies should be applied.

Module 6: Creating An Audio Book For Additional Income

This part of the My Self Publishing Blueprint course is a mix of Emeka Ossai and an expert in audio books industry, George.

However, some parts of this module, like “How Audiobook Royalties Are Calculated” slowed down my learning momentum and were frankly boring.

Some of the things George teaches is good to know stuff, yet some of it is out of our control.

Anyway, depending on your niche, audio books can be a hit or miss.

Next, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen self publishers ask questions in Facebook groups about creating audiobooks as a non-resident of the United States or United Kingdom.

In this course you have the guide on how to do this.

Emeka, in his portion of this module, teaches you how to set up your banking and address if you’re outside the US/UK step by step.

I haven’t seen another course explain this process so well.

Furthermore, you’ll understand the two methods of publishing your audiobook on the ACX platform (which distributes your book to Amazon/Audible).

I’ll end this section with a tip: pay upfront for you audiobook narration (you’ll make more passive income, in the long run, this way).

Key Takeaways From Module 6

• Don’t neglect audiobooks as they can be undercover cash cows.
• It doesn’t matter whether you’re a US/UK resident or not, there’s always a way to create audiobooks.
• Always pay upfront for your audiobooks.

Module 7: Email Marketing For Kindle Publishers

This module, to put it bluntly, is as white hat as the course gets.

Emeka Ossai says nothing surprising here: the people who purchase your book(s) are not your customer – they are Amazon’s customer.

That is until you get them on your email list. You set this up by creating an ethical bribe (or freebie) building your list of readers – your author’s email list.

Emeka shows you a couple of ways on how to set this up (with AWeber or MailChimp). I prefer either ConvertKit or GetResponse as they offer easier automation.

This module will by no means make you a pro at email marketing, but Emeka does a good job at getting you started.

Resource: Autoresponder Madness is an excellent course for any online entrepreneur looking to improve their email marketing skills.

The point of this module is to start getting you in position to build your Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) team. A group of email subscribers who get an advanced copy of your book in exchange for an unbiased and unforced review on launch day.

Want to stay in the Kindle publishing game long-term and not risk your account?

Choose one niche and focus on building your author email list. This a good place to start.

Key Takeaways From Module 7

• Your books’ readers aren’t yours until you get them on your email list.
• Email list building is the core of any online business.

Module 8: Bonus Lessons

Bonus Lessons Properties

Module 8 is a mixed jar of valuable Kindle publishing lessons.

Bundling your books is the first and one of the essential scaling strategies you’ll use as an outsource self publisher.

Emeka Ossai explains the process of bundling – whether you want to bundle two, three, or five books together.

The other noteworthy lesson is the “How to 10X Your Keywords” lesson that teaches you how to optimize your “7 keywords” section in KDP you set for each one of your books.

I recommend using Publisher Rocket (formerly known as KDP Rocket) for this process as it provides a more Amazon monthly search volume for keywords.

The rest of the lessons are quite self-explanatory and are useful on a case-by-case basis.

Module 9: Best Practices (PDFs)

The final section of the course is PDF guides summarizing some of the most important parts of the course.

These are all extremely useful and I can tell Emeka Ossai put a lot of thought into them.

For example, the first PDF is an example of what to post on UpWork to get a virtual assistant to “rank your book.”

Additionally, there’s a section on how to vet VA’s and other places beyond UpWork on where to find them.