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Kindle Direct Publishing - recent experiences

Anything considered a "hustle" and not necessarily a CENTS-based Fastlane

falcon87pl

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Hi Everyone,

I know KDP violates Control and Entry from CENTS (and potentially the Need) but would love to hear about your recent experiences.

Assuming you create high quality medium content or high content book and figure the ads out, is it possible to automate the process? I know you need to publish multiple boks to get majority of your sales just from a few of them :)

Or the competition and changes on the Amazon side force you to publish new content over and over to get some decent profit?

Thanks!
 
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I've been in this industry since 2014. While I've had extreme success with it, I no longer recommend it. I have largely moved on from it as I haven't published anything since 2020. My new interest as a writer is newsletters.

Here are a few reasons why I no longer recommend self-publishing:

1. A few years ago Amazon used to give your book organic traffic if you generated some initial traction (a few hundred sales). These days, it's not working like that anymore. You'll get little, if any, organic sales. The greatest advantage of KDP was that they largely took over your marketing efforts once you proved your book was a seller. Since they aren't doing it now, you may as well sell the book on your own site (assuming it's non-fiction, as fiction is incredibly hard to sell outside of a "real" bookstore).

2. The reason why Amazon doesn't give authors (and primarily self-published authors) much organic sales anymore is because they now have their Amazon Advertising system for books. So instead of them promoting your book for free and sharing the royalties 70/30, now they want you to pay for the ads so that not only they get their 30% share for the book but also your ad spend. So in other words, even though they didn't change the royalty split, they still dramatically lowered it because most authors are forced to advertise to keep getting sales.

3. Since you're only getting 70% of ebook royalties between 2.99 and 9.99 (and only 35% above $10), the price points are way too low to be profitable with ads. Unless you have a lot of books closely related to each other as a series, you won't be able to make it work with books only. Another option is to sell more expensive products on the back end. But then you may as well sell your ebooks through Gumroad or somewhere else. You'll get 100% of your sales, have full price flexibility, get contact information of your customers, and will be able to build a proper funnel.

4. Most of my sales come from the books I published roughly between 2015-2018, when Amazon still rewarded self-published authors. Pretty much all of the books I published in the last 3 years or so didn't even turn a profit even though I did everything "right" and my list of readers grew to over 30,000 subscribers.

5. Amazon's bestsellers list are complete trash these days. This means even if you write a great book, chances are it won't rank because there'll be 30 trashy erotica novels dominating the bestseller lists for your category (even if it has nothing to do with erotica). I explained this in this post: GOLD! - [PROGRESS THREAD] ChickenHawk's Self-Published Fiction EBooks

6. Back in the days, one deal ad on BookBub (the largest book advertising website) could have launched your career (it launched mine). These days, most self-published authors have no chance to ever get a feature. As @MJ DeMarco described it here: RANT - Using BookBub for Book Promotion...

In conclusion, don't bother. Maybe when a new competitor emerges (perhaps built with blockchain) it'll be worth it again.
 

falcon87pl

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Read Rat-Race Escape!
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Apr 6, 2014
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Poland
I've been in this industry since 2014. While I've had extreme success with it, I no longer recommend it. I have largely moved on from it as I haven't published anything since 2020. My new interest as a writer is newsletters.

Here are a few reasons why I no longer recommend self-publishing:

1. A few years ago Amazon used to give your book organic traffic if you generated some initial traction (a few hundred sales). These days, it's not working like that anymore. You'll get little, if any, organic sales. The greatest advantage of KDP was that they largely took over your marketing efforts once you proved your book was a seller. Since they aren't doing it now, you may as well sell the book on your own site (assuming it's non-fiction, as fiction is incredibly hard to sell outside of a "real" bookstore).

2. The reason why Amazon doesn't give authors (and primarily self-published authors) much organic sales anymore is because they now have their Amazon Advertising system for books. So instead of them promoting your book for free and sharing the royalties 70/30, now they want you to pay for the ads so that not only they get their 30% share for the book but also your ad spend. So in other words, even though they didn't change the royalty split, they still dramatically lowered it because most authors are forced to advertise to keep getting sales.

3. Since you're only getting 70% of ebook royalties between 2.99 and 9.99 (and only 35% above $10), the price points are way too low to be profitable with ads. Unless you have a lot of books closely related to each other as a series, you won't be able to make it work with books only. Another option is to sell more expensive products on the back end. But then you may as well sell your ebooks through Gumroad or somewhere else. You'll get 100% of your sales, have full price flexibility, get contact information of your customers, and will be able to build a proper funnel.

4. Most of my sales come from the books I published roughly between 2015-2018, when Amazon still rewarded self-published authors. Pretty much all of the books I published in the last 3 years or so didn't even turn a profit even though I did everything "right" and my list of readers grew to over 30,000 subscribers.

5. Amazon's bestsellers list are complete trash these days. This means even if you write a great book, chances are it won't rank because there'll be 30 trashy erotica novels dominating the bestseller lists for your category (even if it has nothing to do with erotica). I explained this in this post: GOLD! - [PROGRESS THREAD] ChickenHawk's Self-Published Fiction EBooks

6. Back in the days, one deal ad on BookBub (the largest book advertising website) could have launched your career (it launched mine). These days, most self-published authors have no chance to ever get a feature. As @MJ DeMarco described it here: RANT - Using BookBub for Book Promotion...

In conclusion, don't bother. Maybe when a new competitor emerges (perhaps built with blockchain) it'll be worth it again.
Thanks for such a detailed response!

30% for Amazon, Amazon ads, local taxes and it turns out you have to sell thousands of books to make your time worth it. And they still could cancel your account and kill the biznes in a second.
 
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MJ DeMarco

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KDP is not a business, it is a channel.

Know the difference, and it will work for you.

For example, you have no platform, no audience, and you publish a book. You'll get 10 sales at best.
You own a blog with 250,000 sessions per month, your YouTube channel has 500K subscribers, and you have a big follower count on IG: Publishing a book on KDP will be great for you.

Point is when it comes to KDP and self-publishing is that you need to build your audience first...

Platform...
Audience...
KDP.
 
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