Spanking the Kindle for $345,000 in 5 Months (9)
Has anybody experimented with the Amazon platform?
I've spent a couple of months churning out products for the Kindle with varying degrees of success. One of the things that seems clear to me: the potential on Amazon is huge, for both marketers and writers.
There are two ways you can make money from ebooks on the Kindle...
1. By tapping in to the huge audience, selling a lot of books, and lapping up the royalties.
18 months ago, John Locke became the first self-published author to hit 1 million sales on Amazon at a rate of one download every 7 seconds.
You've got to be a pretty relentless writer to replicate his success. A large part of it hangs on creating a series rather than a single ebook.
Amazon gives you a 35% royalty on sales under $2.99, and a 70% royalty on sales over it.
Sell a million books at $0.99 and you'll make $345,000. Sell a million at $2.99 and you'll make $2.09 Million.
If it sounds a little daunting to sell a million books, the good news is that on Amazon, it is crazy easy to score sales - especially at the lowest price point.
I've only been selling some (quite averagely written) non-fiction in the self-help space, but if you do the early work well, the sales flow on autopilot.
Success hinges on a good blurb, some initial good reviews, a good cover art, and a smart concept ('How to...'s work great). There's also a fiendishly effective shortcut to the top when you give your books away for free...
2. By using the Kindle platform to drive traffic to your website
A lot of affiliates are completely missing this opportunity.
When you publish an ebook on Amazon, you can enrol in the KDP Select program and choose 5 days out of 90 where the book is given away for free.
I did this with a self-help title that was purposefully written to funnel users through to my website and get them added to a mailing list. You have to add a lot of value to get away with the tactic, but when it works, you'll notice a big increase in traffic to your website - as well as subscribers.
I had 1600 users download one of my *very niche* titles in the space of 2 days. Quite a few of those users read the book (apparently) and converted on my mailing list, where I'll be working to increase their lifetime value.
God only knows how effective this could be for a well-written dieting guide. If you tap a monster trend, people will download in their thousands.
Admittedly, you can only give away your book for 5 days out of every 90. I only experimented with a niche title so it's difficult to predict the blowup potential, but I'm guessing there is scope to use Amazon solely as a list building tool.
I posted about this yesterday - http://finchsells.com/2013/01/07/mak...0-in-5-months/
How many of you guys get badgered by friends and family asking for ways to start their own online business? My new answer is "Go and write something on Kindle."
I think it's really going to explode in the next 18 months, and as marketers, we should be following closely.
buddy of mine is killing in on kindle.... about to release my kindle book soon.... crossing fingers it does well.
lotsa opportunity there in the amazon channel... the trick i guess is getting the downloads... then funneling them back into your sales funnel
The tried and tested strategy for getting downloads seems to be:
1. Make your product available for free from Day 1.
2. Submit your book to the sites that cover new free releases on Kindle.
3. Use your 5 days of free downloads to get strong reviews, move up the Bestseller charts, and crowbar your book in to 'Customers also bought this...' lists.
4. Once your free promotion days are used up, price low.
Obviously, it's a different strategy if you're trying to maximise the royalties.
I'm going to be releasing an affiliate marketing product through the platform next week. It'll be interesting to see how that performs when it's cross promoted on my sites.
Good luck with your new release!
The key with the Kindle platform is similar to how you want to game any single-platform with hierarchical and categorical subdivisions (i.e. iOS/Android app stores, Amazon Kindle or regular products etc). There's the age old chicken or egg question of do the NY times bestsellers continue to stay up there so long because they're that good or because of the effect of the reviews/visibility fueling their growth. This principle is what you take advantage to sell copies.
If you take a look over at the main kindle page at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers...rsr_kstore_2_2
You'll see the top 100 paid and free books. Kind of like the app store. Whenever anyone opens their kindles to look for books, these get the most exposure. If your book is absolute trash and on here, I'd reckon you're still going to eat pretty well. How you want to do research is like what Finch mentions in his post -- you want to think long term about an entire series. Pick a pen name that resonates with your target demographic, create/get content created in the same voice as how they talk. Your goal is to click on the left until you get so far down until there are no more subcategories. So let's click on non-fiction, then lifestyle & home, then home & garden, then craft & hobbies, then fun with paper & wood & knives. You've reached the innermost category, and if you want to begin your gaming of the kindle ranking system, you start here.
Scroll down to the bottom and click on #20 paid, its ranking is #332,642 in the kindle store. That's roughly 2-3 paid sales and you will top him, which means it will be easy for you to break into the top 20, and if you look at #1, it's only ranked at #82k, which is not that hard to break into either. What you want to aim for is to target your KDP promotions one 24 hour period at a time. You'll want to pre-seed your book with good reviews from family/friends who buy your book and will give you a convincing review. Then when your book goes on sale for free, you can easily get 3000-5000 free downloads, and you will shoot up the rankings when your book reverts back to paid. The most important thing this does is it now fills in the part in Amazon with "Customers who bought this item also bought.." which will give your book way more exposure than some ultra niche DIY crowd who likes to mess with crafts.
Keeping with the example though, you will have already had a series created. So your pen-named author is not just a woodworking expert, he/she also messes with every single category under craft & hobbies. Crafts for Children, Dollhouses, Fashion, Jewelry, etc. You repeat this process and most importantly CROSS-LINK at the beginning/end of your books links to your other kindle books (for internal book promotions, you can update the links after they're published too btw). You get I forget 3 or 5 days of KDP free promotions under the KDP select program. If you do this with ALL your books, you will not only pop up under most any craft/hobby book that anyone searches for, but it will have a viral effect in that even books unrelated to yours will show others as "buying" your book as a result of dl'ing it under the free promotion period. Your most successful book will now not only be #1 for the deepest subcategory, but now may be the top-ranked book in Home & Garden, the next level up. Now you have a TON more eyeballs who are exposed to your book and may impulse buy it at 99 cents, and so on up the chain to Lifestyle & Home, with a tsunami-like effect building momentum as more and more people see it, and more people buying it causing it pop up in Amazon recommends... lists. You repeat mass promotions until you run out of free days, and you still have the option to SEO your books for keywords relating to your topics, with the advantage of a hugely trusted and high PR Amazon domain to build on top of.
There's a ton more things that you can do if you have no morals, like purchasing reviews for your books via some sites where you can get these types of tasks done (the funniest is when you use Amazon's own mturk to fuel your own reviews) when the free period is going on. Not a big fan of products, but I've heard good things about Jonny Andrew's Perfect Publishing system and Michael Alvear's Make a Killing on Kindle if you are interested in the subject. Not an affiliate/product-owner of either obviously, but most of what I've learned & applied were from people who were heavily influenced via those methods.
Oh and be careful if you enroll in KDP, you cannot sell any electronic version of that product up in any other place online (iBooks, etc) for 90 days I believe. Your own website I think is a grey line, but just keep an eye out for that
Awesome info! How many books did you create to reach this amount, and how many pages is acceptable for a book with a low price point like $2.99?
I think the accepted page count for $2.99 depends on the niche and how valuable the information is considered.
If you release a short story, $2.99 is going to be considered expensive.
If you release a report that teaches somebody how to potentially make $1000s, $2.99 is a bargain.
Also think of your target audience...
If you're shooting for, say, the extreme couponing creeps who drive 50 miles to save $5, then they're probably going to be more price sensitive.
I published a book thru the Kindle platform, but never did any marketing for it. It does not have any reviews. The sales price is $6.99. It's a self-help book in a certain field and it has decent sales number considering that I am doing zero promotion. I wanted to see first how the platform works. The one thing I learned is that I went too much into a niche. The target audience is too small. Fortunately I can take the content and change it up a bit and add some more generic stuff and move it out of that deep niche. The one thing I have to say is that I am using that book to establish some authority level in a certain field (it's a technical niche). But after reading your postings above, the next book will definitely be promoted - especially since it then moves into an evergreen area.
By the way - I published books starting in 2001 and sold a few thousand copies (hard copies). You don't get rich that way, but let the books ride for years and small change is coming in month after month. I published another book in 2005 - it is completely outdated by now, but every quarter I am getting check that pays for a nice dinner in a good restaurant. 
Does anyone know of a good template to start with for formatting the actual book? I know that's a bit off topic, but that has always been a big barrier to entry for me. I'm kind of a perfectionist and I wouldn't want to put all that time into writing something that ends up looking terrible on the kindle.
I use Microsoft Word in webpage mode.
I was a little intimidated by the formatting stories at first. But you've got to remember that most of the horror stories come from people who are good writers, but have little to no web experience. It's pretty easy.
If you really don't want to touch software, there are plenty of gigs on Fiverr where you can get the formatting done for cheap.
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