In this post, I’m going to show you step by step how I quit my job in Finance to publish eBooks with Amazon KDP full-time. Getting started with self-publishing was probably the best decision I’ve made in my entire life because I make a lot more than I was making and I now enjoy a monthly passive income that allows me to travel anywhere in the world, wake up when I want, and ultimately live a life of freedom.I published over 100 books in the last year and these books make an average of $40-$90 per month. I’m going to show you step by step how to do the same so you can achieve the same results. Oh and by the way, and you won’t even have to write the books yourself!
What is Kindle?
So what exactly is Kindle? Basically, in 2007 Amazon created a way for authors to self-publish their books by releasing them as eBooks for Kindle eReaders. The platform that allows you to do this is called Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This platform allows you to publish a book while completely removing the “middleman” (the publishing companies). The days where a writer has to send their book to hundreds of publishers with the hope that one of them decides to publish are gone. The days where the author made almost NO money with their book because the publishing company kept almost all of the profits are also gone. You can literally create a KDP account in less than ten minutes and start selling your book right away. The potential is huge because e-books are now massively outselling physical paperback books and this trend will just increase in the future as more people become comfortable reading digital books.
Now what I’m going to teach you is a step by step method to publish books on KDP, where you don’t even have to write the books yourself. That said, if you are a writer you can publish your books, but this is totally optional as you are going to see in a second.
How making money with Kindle works
The first thing you need to do is to create a free KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) account. Now that your KDP account is created, you can easily add a new book within five minutes. You only have to fill in the title of your book, the sub-title, the book description, the author’s name or pen name, upload your book cover, upload your e-book, select your book price and publish it! After you do this, the KDP will then review your book and within 24 hours (sometimes it takes only a few hours), your book will be published and it will be ready to be purchased on Amazon! There are a lot of things you can do to promote your book, but Amazon actually does most of the selling for you because people TRUST Amazon. Also, Amazon BRINGS the traffic for you since it spends A LOT of money per year on advertising so you don’t have to do it yourself.
How much will you get paid?
There are basically two types of royalty on KDP: 35% and 70%. To get the 70% royalties, you have to price your book between $2.99 to $9.99. You will get a 35% royalty if you price your book below $2.99 or above $9.99. Now you might wonder, why would anyone price their book under $2.99 if you only get a 35% royalty? Usually the lower your price, the more people buy your book and the more it improves your rankings. The Amazon Algorithm works in a way that the more people buy your book, the easier it will be for people to find your book on Amazon and you will end up making more sales. One of the strategies that I like to use is to start by pricing my book at $0.99 so a lot of people buy it and it makes my Amazon rankings increase. When my Amazon ranking is good (I’ll give you more info on this later), I then price my book at $2.99. I always price my books at $2.99 because this is the lowest price point that allows me to still get the 70% royalty. I’ve done a lot of research on this and concluded that this price point is simply the best. At this price point you make about $2.00 per sale. I know this doesn't sound like a lot of money but remember, there are A LOT of people who buy e-books on Amazon! It’s all about volume. On average, most of my books make about $50 per month but I have books that make over $1000 per month! Remember, most of these books I did not even write myself because I pay people a small fee to write them for me. Let’s say that you make $50 per month with your book. That means that you make $600 per year with this book. Now, there are many ways to outsource the book writing to someone else for less than $50 so that means that after only the first month, you already recovered your expenses and from now on all the money that you make is PROFIT. Would you be willing to invest less than $50 to make $600 per year of passive income year after year? We are talking about a return of over 1000% in the FIRST year. Can you imagine if you have 50 books? 100 books? 200 books? This system works and can set you financially free really fast.
If you price your book correctly, Amazon will pay you a royalty of up to 70% for every sale that you make. This royalty is MUCH HIGHER than what someone would make with a publishing company. On top of that, Amazon gives you tools to promote your book so you make more sales. I’ll explain this in greater details later in this post.
How to find a good niche
This is probably the most important thing. First of all, what is a niche? A niche is basically a market segment. A niche is your target market. Weight loss is a niche and everybody interested in weight loss is your target market.
The key to finding a profitable niche is finding one with a with a descent market size and low competition. If the market is too small, chances are high that you won’t make any sales and if the market is big but the competition is way too intense, it will be really hard to compete against these books because they will rank higher than you in the Amazon search engine. Because the competition is intense, people won’t even find your book on Amazon and you won’t make any sales! There are many ways to compete in these competitive markets, but if you are just starting out, I recommend sticking with markets without too much competition.
As you can see here, on the left side of the Amazon Kindle website there are a lot of book categories. Each category is a Niche. If you click on one of the categories, you will see that sub-categories will appear. These are called sub-niches. These are basically Niches within a Niche.
Picking a good niche is extremely important because even if you market your book perfectly, if there is no market for your book, it just won’t sell. Actually, I would much rather a book with poor marketing in an amazing Niche than a book with perfect marketing in a bad Niche!
You ALWAYS want to do proper research before you publish a book. A lot of people make this mistake. They have an idea for a book, outsource it to someone then publish it and then they realize that they are not making any sales. Why did this happen? It happened because they did not research before they published their book.
Here is a quick resume of how to do proper research before you publish a book.
The first thing you want to do is to go on Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more then select KINDLE STORE. By selecting this, you will only see the Kindle books.
Now let me show you something...Let’s write the word Organize in the search bar...
Notice how Amazon is suggesting me ideas on what I could do a search for. Some of these suggestions are organize tomorrow today, organize your day, organize your life, organize now, etc. What does this mean? It basically means that A LOT of people typed this in the search bar in the past. The first suggestion is the one which people searched for the most; the second one is the number two, etc. This is really useful because if people searched for it, it means there is a market for it!
The next thing you want to do is to analyse the competition. As I said earlier, even if there is a market it does not necessarily mean that you will make money. Some markets are so competitive that it is nearly impossible to compete. Of course when you get good at this you can enter competitive markets, but if you are just starting out you should stick with good niches with low to medium competition.
Now, you will notice that every time you do a search in the search bar, the number of books in that category will appear. I’ll give you an example. Let’s do a search for the keyword (what you put in the search bar) Organize.
As you can see, there are 1 368 Kindle books for that specific keyword. Let’s do a more specific search...Let’s type in a suggestion that Amazon made. Let’s do a search for Organize your day.
As you can see, there are only 173 Kindle books for that specific keyword! The reason for this is that this keyword is more specific. Because there is less competition for Organize your day than Organize, it will be much easier to rank your book on the first page of the Amazon website for this keyword. Remember: people pretty much always only check the books on the first page so if your book ranks on the third page for example, chances are high that you won’t make any sales because people won’t even see your book!
Now with that being said, the number of books in a category is not the only thing you should look at. This is a good indicator of the size of the market, but it doesn’t indicate the strength of the competition. There are Niches out there in which there are thousands of books, but the competition is not strong because most of the books have bad reviews, bad covers, their descriptions are not good and their books are not optimized properly in a way in which the Amazon algorithm boost their rankings.
You also have to look at the quality of the books. If you see a niche in which there are thousands of books but most books on the first page only have seven or eight reviews each, then it would be fairly easy to compete against them by having more reviews than them. If on top of that these books have bad covers, bad reviews, bad descriptions and the books are not optimized properly, then it would be REALLY EASY to compete with them, even though there are a lot of books in this category. In the end, it’s all about the strength of the competition!
Another thing you want to do is to ALWAYS look at the Amazon Bestseller Rank.Let’s look at the best seller rank of the first book for the keyword Organize your day. You basically want to click on the book and scroll down to the Product details section.
As you can see, this book ranks at 86 339 on Amazon, which is really good. Anything under 100 000 good. What you want to do when you do research is to open a few books on the first page of your keyword and check if these books are ranked under 100 000. If they are, it means these books are making good money. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should write a book in this category. As I said multiple times, you have to look at the STRENGTH of the competition. If all the books on the first page have over 50 reviews, then to compete with them, I would have to get pretty much the same number of reviews. Some markets have a really high barrier of entry. What I mean by that is that even if this market is good, the competition is so strong that it would require too many efforts to actually optimize your book in a way that you can compete with the other books. What I recommend to beginners is to find markets in which the books on the first page rank under 100 000 and in which the competition is not too strong.
There is so much more to it but the goal of this post is to give you a good overview of how Kindle works.
How to pick a good title and cover for your book
Your title and cover are really important. People literally judge a book by its cover. The title is really important. Good titles sell the book and are descriptive. The more specific that you are, the better. You should always put your keyword in your title also as it will improve your rankings. I recommend you to study your competition and see what they are doing.
For the cover, you have two options. The first one is to do it yourself with Photoshop. Personally, I’ve never done one cover in my entire life and I have zero interest in doing so and this is why I always outsource this. The cheapest option out there is to go to www.fiverr.com . What you want to do is do a search for Kindle cover in the search bar.
You are going to see tons of people that can create a cover for you Kindle for only $5! I recommend you to only work with someone with high rankings that has a portfolio. There are other alternative out there but I always use Fiverr and I’m happy with the results.
Write or out-source the book
You have two options. You could write the book yourself, or you can outsource the writing of your book to someone else as the majority of my students do. A lot of people are intimidated by the idea of writing a book but remember, you are going to sell your book for only $2.99! People don’t expect you to have a 100+ pages book at this price point. Over time I’ve realized that many of my short books (20 to 30 pages) sell much better than my longer books (80+ pages). I wondered why and came to the conclusion that people that buy these kinds of books are looking for a QUICK FIX. They don’t want to read over 100 pages to know what they need to do to lose weight, they want the answers FAST. In some cases, the shorter the book, the better. This is true with non-fiction books especially. With fiction books, people enjoy the story so they expect the books to be longer but for non-fiction, they just want THE SOLUTION. There is alot of money to be made with fiction books, but because it is harder to rank your books high in the search engine and because these books require more pages, I recommend beginners to start with non-fiction books. Not only is it easier to rank non-fiction books, but because the book is shorter, it costs less money to outsource!
To outsource your book, I recommend you to go to www.upwork.com . You will find a lot of people that can write a book for you for under $50. There are many techniques to find high quality writers but you basically want someone with perfect English that doesn’t charge a lot of money. You basically want to post a job on Upwork saying you need someone to write an e-book for you andthen you can select one out of the many that reply to your post.
How to Publish your Book
Now that your book and cover is ready, you need to publish your book. The first thing you need to do is to sign in to your KDP account and click on Bookshelf. The next thing you need to do is to click on Create new title.
When you click on it, it will bring you to the next page which is where you need to fill in your book name, book contributors and you book description. You will also need to verify your publishing rights, add categories and keywords for your book, upload your book cover and upload your book.
I use pen names for most of my books. Amazon allows you to do that and this is really useful because you can have a pen name for each niche that you are in. If you write a few books in the fitness niche, they can all have the pen name and if you write a bunch of books in the seduction niche, you can use another pen name. This is useful because people that buy one of your books will see that you have more books under your pen name and will also buy your other books.
You also want to make sure that your book description is well done and really sells the book. Amazon allows you to use HTML so you can create a really good description for your book. Here is a part of the description of one of my books.
On the next page, you will have to verify your publishing territories and choose your royalty.
What you want to do here is to select Worldwide rights. By doing this, your book Will be available in ALL the markets available. You will notice that most of your sales will come from the U.S.A but some of your sales will also come from other countries. As Amazon grows in the future, more sales are going to come from other countries!
The next thing you want to do is to select a royalty option for your book.
As you can see, I selected the 70% royalty option and I priced my book at $2.99. It even shows you how much money you will make on the other Kindle platforms around the world...As I said earlier, when I first publish a book I usually select the 35% royalty option and price my book at $0.99. I do this because at first, you want to get as many sales as possible to improve your rankings as fast as possible. Less people will buy your book if it is priced at $2.99. Because your book is cheaper, it is also easier to collect reviews for your book because more people download it! The more sales and the more reviews that you get, the faster you will end up on the first page for your category. Once my book is on the first page and has a few reviews, I change the royalty option to 70% and price it at $2.99. This is when you start to actually make money with your book!
Then you need to save and publish your book.
You just need to click on Save and Publish and your book will be published within 24 hours. In some cases, your book will even be published within a few hours.
Getting reviews
Reviews are really important. Before doing a purchase, most people look at the reviews before they make their final decision. If your book has a lot of one or two star reviews, people will just not buy it. If you book has zero reviews, chances are also high that people are not going to buy it. The more positive reviews that you have, the more your book will sell and the more your rankings will be good. Now, if your book is brand new the problem is it will have zero reviews so not a lot of people will buy it. You need to get reviews as fast as possible to make your rankings improve.
Amazon has really strict Review Guidelines and I highly recommend you read them. There are TONS of ways to get reviews for your books but this is just an overview... One of the easiest ways is to give your book to people for free. You can ask friends or even go in Facebook groups that are relevant to your niche and give your book for free. You can either just send the Word version of your book to the people or you could also give your book as a gift to someone so they don’t have to pay for it! To give a book as a gift, you need to click on “Give As A Gift” and send it to their e-mail address. This way, they get your book for free and they can review it!
If for some reason you don’t see the Give as a Gift, log out from your account and do a search for your book again. You should see it now.
For example, for the Organize your day book, you would want to find as many people as possible with an interest in being more productive in life. It could be on forums, on twitter or Facebook groups. If we take Facebook for example, you would just need to do a search for Productivity, success or time management in the Facebook search bar, then select groups. You will then see a lot of groups in which you could find people that can review your book. By posting on the group that you are offering your book for free because you need people to give their honest opinion, you can get a lot of reviews.This will boost your rankings quickly and bring your book to the first page in your category.
There are two types of reviews. There are the verified reviews and the unverified reviews. A verified review is when someone actually bought or downloaded your Kindle book before posting the review. I’ll give you an example:
As you can see, it says Verified Purchase. You have to be aware that verified reviews are what boosts your book rankings the most. This is how the Amazon algorithm works. It is much better to have 10 verified reviews than 10 un-verified reviews. I recommend you stick with verified reviews to improve your rankings as much as possible.
There are many other ways to get verified reviews out there but this is just an overview.
How to promote your book
Each time you publish a new book, Amazon asks you if you want to enrol your book in the KDP Select Program. The KDP Select Program is really useful because it gives you the opportunity to take advantage of a Free Promotion as well as the Kindle Countdown Deals. I highly recommend everybody to enrol in KDP select because these two tools are really amazing when you know how to use them. When you enrol your book in KDP Select, your book becomes exclusive to Amazon for 90 days. Basically, you are not allowed to publish your Kindle book anywhere else on the internet during that period. However, it doesn’t matter because Amazon is by far the best website when it comes to e-books. They literally own this space. Don’t worry, there is plenty of money to be made on Amazon, especially with these two marketing tools they let you use when you enrol in KDP Select.
The first tool they give you is the 5 free days of promotion. You can offer your book for free for a total of 5 days during these 90 days. You can split those 5 days over the 3 months if you want. During your Free Promotion, Amazon will list your book in the Free Books section of their website and this will result in MANY downloads of your book. The more downloads you get during these free days, the more it will help boost your rankings.
The second tool they give you is the Kindle Countdown Deals. This allows you to offer a discount on your Kindle book for a specific period of time. If the regular price of your book is $2.99, then you could do a promotion in which your book is sold at $1.99 instead. When you do this, your book is also featured in the Kindle Countdown Deals section of the Amazon website and this will drive a lot of traffic to your book and ultimately, boost your rankings.
There are MANY ways to promote your Kindle books. I’ll give you a few examples.
One of the things you can do is promote your book on Facebook. There are a lot of groups out there that let you promote your book on their page. This will drive a lot of traffic to your book and ultimately boosts your rankings. Here is a sort list of Facebook groups:
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Another strategy is to promote your book on Twitter. There are a lot of people on Twitter that will promote your book for FREE to their audience. Here is list of a few of them:
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Another strategy is to submit your book on Kindle promotion websites. These websites have huge lists of readers and they offer to promote your Kindle book for free. Here is a short list of websites that offer this service:
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You can also go on Fiverr and do a search for Kindle promotionand you will find hundreds of people that offer their services to promote your book everywhere on the internet!
Conclusion
I hope this guide helped you understand moreabout how Kindle works and how it can create financial freedom in your life. This is only a short resume of how Kindle works. There are hundreds of techniques to get verified reviews fast, how to find good niches, how to pick good titles, how to optimize your Kindle books to boost their rankings, etc. It would literally take me weeks to cover all of this in this post! I just covered the basics so you understand how easy it is to get started with it and start making passive income online.
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