I’ve made my first $500 on Amazon by selling several of my ebooks on the Kindle platform. They’re now earning me recurring income each month.
If you don’t remember, I wrote a post on some of my key findings from creating, marketing, and publishing these books.
It’s been an amazing experience writing these various ebooks. I absolutely love to write. When I realized that I could make money doing it, I was overjoyed. Some day I’d like to be a published author.
If you know my story, by no means is Amazon’s Kindle program my only source of income, but it has been one that I’ve always been interested in exploring.
I’ve spent a lot of time and money learning some of the things I’m about to share in this article, and I want to save you both.
Hopefully, you’ll avoid some of the costly mistakes that I’ve made and have a better book launch!
1. Don’t make it about you. It’s about the reader
This is THE biggest mistake that writers and authors make. They publish a book that they think is amazing, original, or has high-value, and no one buys it.
Writing a book isn’t about vanity. It’s about practicality. What value are you delivering to the reader?
After reading your book, the reader should be able to accomplish a task more effectively. There should be some kind of promised result.
Even if you’re writing a fiction book, the reader is expecting to go through an emotional roller coaster. If it’s a romance novel, they’re expecting to live vicariously through the romantic drama of the characters. If it’s a thriller, they want to feel excited or even scared.
The reader is not coming to Amazon for you. They’re coming for what result or emotion you’re promising.
Naturally, if you’re a part of the demographic that you’re targeting, you could write a book that you yourself want to read. But, you should still take the reader into account.
2. Yes, you can do this on a budget
You’re either going to be spending time or money to bring a new creation into the world. If you don’t have money, there are some tools that you can use to accomplish some of what goes into making a great book.
WordPress-Hosted Website
A great cheap way to set up a landing page or website for your book. This is what I used to set up the sites for my ebooks. I include free content on these websites that’s related to the book.
Canva
This is what I’ve used to design the covers for the various ebooks. I like that canva has both free and premium options. It’s pretty easy to figure out for any beginner. A designer will obviously make your book’s cover stand out more, but if you’re on a budget, check out Canva.
Microsoft Word
Thought you couldn’t get any more basic, right? I tried using Apple’s Pages and Apple’s iBooks Author, but I’ve found Microsoft Word to be the best formatting tool for Kindle. However, I do use Apple’s iBooks Author to format the ebooks that I sell privately on my other website.
Aside from great writing, these are really the only tools that you need to have a strong web presence and get the book out there into the Amazon marketplace.
3. You must market the Kindle ebook!
Amazon is not going to market it for you. I was part of the “coming soon” section for both of my releases, and it didn’t do all that much to increase pre-orders.
Obviously, you don’t have to do a pre-order, but I did find that it was a good marketing strategy. I was able to stir up a bit of chatter for the book before it officially launched. Eventually, I released the ebook to this dedicated list of pre-orders all at once.
Ultimately, you need your own marketing strategy. I recommend having one central website and email list at the center of all of your marketing. Unless you’re directing people to the pre-order, you should be sending them to your website to collect email addresses.
While you don’t need a specific social media profile for your ebook, I’d highly recommend having one for your author profile. This includes major sites like:
Eventually, you can create an author profile on Amazon if you choose to write multiple books.
The way that I marketed my book was I drove all of the traffic from my website and social media channels to an email sign up form using MailChimp.
People could sign up if they wanted to be notified about the pre-order, along with a bit of bonus content. That list was a big source of my early sales.
4. It’s going to be hard to make a living
While yes, I’ve made my first $500 on Kindle, I don’t expect it at all to be my core source of income.
Most Kindle books don’t make any money at all. There are only a few markets large enough to make a reasonable income from selling information products like ebooks. Naturally, they’re pretty competitive.
Therefore, most of your income would come from one book that’s a breakout success and establishes your brand, or it would be divided among many different kindle ebooks.
You could also use the ebook as a form of paid content marketing, where you’re establishing authority in an industry so that you can then sell higher priced products.
From an income perspective, I think that Kindle ebooks will be a good supplementary stream. Everyone who’s in the online business world should have supplementary streams of income to help stabilize their overall revenue.
This really isn’t shocking news. There’s a reason why only a handful of authors are rich full-time authors. Bestsellers are few and far in-between.
5. Make a physical copy available with CreateSpace
At first, I was just going to have an ebook version for sale, but I decide to go ahead, learn how to use CreateSpace and get a physical version of my book out there. I’m glad I did!
While I have had more sales of the ebook version of my books, I have also seen sales from CreateSpace, so there is demand out there for physical books within the Amazon ecosystem, even if they’re a bit more expensive.
The nice thing about having a physical copy is that you can also give people copies at networking events. You can also offer to give them away as part of different promotions. This can be a great way to get genuine Amazon reviews, which we all know, is a big part of standing out from the crowd on Amazon.
6. Read up on Amazon SEO
Like Google, Amazon is a search engine. It’s job is to deliver content that matters to the reader.
This takes the form of books that they think the reader will like and relevant books that will show up when the reader performs a search.
I wish I took more time to think about books that are “related to mine” and the keywords that people will be searching for on Amazon before they discover my book. However, my books are trending for the major searches that I wanted to appear in.
This is a good article by Moz on the topic of Amazon SEO. I’d also recommend reading up on this one so that you can appear in search ahead of your competitors.
7. Reviews are harder to get than you think
Obviously, I’ve bought products on Amazon. I’ve bought books on Amazon. I’ve bought ebooks on Amazon.
You come across a popular book with all these Amazon reviews, and you think that there’s a thriving community on the website.
Wrong! It’s actually super hard to get Amazon reviews. You have to directly ask people to go out of their way to leave a review. You have to hustle. You gotta be a little bit annoying about it.
Naturally, most people are lazy and aren’t going to leave a book review unless they hated it or it changed their life. If it’s anywhere in between, you gotta put in the leg work for your reviews.
This is actually pretty similar to iTunes podcast reviews (I surpassed 100 recently). If you want genuine reviews, you gotta take the time to ask for them. You have to put your heart on the line and believe in what you created or wrote. It’s tough!
Just remember that even a few positive reviews on Amazon is gold! Other people will come to the product page, decide to buy it, and it will be easier and easier to get more reviews. It’s just those initial ones that are a bit like pulling teeth.
I hope that this list of things that you should be aware of before self-publishing your book is helpful! If you enjoy it, take a sec to let me know!