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Intro
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.
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.
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