Transcription
I want to talk about the gap between making a little bit of money on Amazon KDP and actually making real money. Because here's what happens for a lot of people. They start publishing. They get a few sales. Maybe they get to a point where they're making $50 or $100 a month and they think, "Okay, this is working. I just need to keep doing this." So, they keep publishing. They put out more books. They keep going. And the numbers just don't move. Or they move so slowly it barely feels like progress. And after a while, it starts to feel like maybe this thing has a ceiling. Like maybe $100 a month is just what this is. Or maybe even that this doesn't work. Not for them.
Anyway, self-publishing doesn't have a ceiling. But getting past that $100 per month point isn't about publishing more books. It's about doing things differently. And I know that sounds vague. So, let me be really specific about what I actually mean. Because I've been at that $100 a month mark and I've been well past it. And the difference wasn't that I worked harder. The difference was that I changed what I was working on and how I was making decisions. That's what this video was about. What actually has to change and what you can do about it right now.
Now, if you are new here, I'm Caroline and I'm a self-publisher who has been creating and selling books on Amazon for 8 years. And on this channel, I show you how to do the same. So, let's get started with why most people get stuck because it's important to look at the wise before we talk about how to fix it.
The first reason is publishing without validating demand. This is probably the most common one and it's the one that costs people the most time. Most people pick niches based on a feeling. It looks popular or they saw someone else doing it or they just like the idea of it. And sometimes that does work out. But a lot of the time you end up putting weeks of work into a book in a niche that either doesn't have enough buyers or it has so much competition that a new self-publisher has no chance of breaking through. And the frustrating thing is you don't always know that's what's happened. you just know the book isn't selling.
Before I talk about how to fix this, I do want to point you to something that I put together. It is a free report of 100 profitable KDP niche opportunities. Actual niches with real demand behind them that I'd consider publishing in and some of them I do publish in myself. If you're at a point where you're not sure what to publish next, or you want to get a better feel for what good demand actually looks like, grab it from the link down in the description box below. It's completely free and it will give you a solid starting point.
Now, back to why people get stuck. The second reason is that your book covers don't compete. I want you to go and search for your type of book on Amazon right now or think about the last time that you did. When that page of results loads, you're making a decision about which ones to click on before you've read a single word, before you've looked at what the book actually is and what it's about. You're going by the cover. And that's what every buyer is doing. If your cover doesn't look as good as the ones sitting above you in the search results, and I mean genuinely good, not just close enough, buyers are not clicking on your book. They don't know your interior is great, cuz they never get that far.
The third reason is what I call a scattered catalog. A lot of people have books in five or six or seven completely different niches with no real connection between any of them. There's no logic to it, no strategy, just a collection of individual books, hoping for the best. And the problem is none of these books are supporting each other. There's no compounding happening. Every book is starting from scratch on its own.
And the fourth reason which ties into all the others is not understanding how Amazon search actually works. Your title, your subtitle, your keywords, your description. These aren't just admin features in the back end. These are how Amazon decides who sees your book and when. If those things aren't doing what they're supposed to do, it doesn't matter how good your book is. The right buyers are never going to find it.
So, let's get into what you can actually do because I want this to be practical and I want you to take something away from this video, something actionable that you can go and do right now today. I'm going to take you through five things that will actually make a difference. And I want to be specific about each one because I think general advice is pretty useless when you're trying to figure out what to do this week.
The first one is fixing your niche research process. And I don't mean just the idea of doing research. I mean actually doing it in a way that tells you something useful before you commit weeks of your time to creating a book. The main thing that you're looking for is evidence that people are buying in this niche right now. The bestseller rank on books in that niche is your best signal. If you're looking at a niche and the books ranking in it have BSRS in the hundreds of thousands, that means they're hardly selling. You want to see books with strong consistent bestseller ranks. That tells you that the buyers are there. You also want to look at the competition. How many results come up when you search your main keyword? Are the books on that first page of results coming from established publishers with thousands of reviews? Or is there a mix that suggests there is room for new books to rank? Those two things, demand and competition, are what tell you whether a niche is worth your time before you even open Canva.
The second thing is auditing your existing listings. And I would actually go and do this before you think about publishing anything new. Go through your catalog of books and look at each one with fresh eyes. Does your title include words that someone would actually type into the Amazon search bar to find that type of book? Not a clever title, not a cute title, the actual keywords that buyers are using. Does your description make someone want to buy it? Or does it just describe what the book is? There is a big difference between those two things. And have you actually thought about what's in your backend keywords or did you just fill those in quickly when you first publish the book and then have never looked at them again? I've seen some people's monthly income numbers change without publishing a single book just from going back and fixing this kind of stuff. It's not exciting work, but it matters.
The third thing to do is to start publishing in clusters. Instead of spreading your books across different niches, pick a niche that's working and go deep on it. If you've got a book in a niche that is getting consistent sales, your next book should be in that same niche or right next to it at least. When a buyer finds one of your books and clicks on your author name or your brand name to see what else you've got, you want them to find more of what they're already looking for. A targeted catalog sells itself in a way that a scattered one never will. And from Amazon's side, when you're consistently publishing in the same niche, you become really relevant to those search terms over time.
The fourth thing is to take your covers seriously. And I mean really seriously. I know that this comes up in nearly every KDP video, but it keeps coming up because people keep underestimating it. Your cover is not just a visual, it's a tool, a selling tool. It is the first thing that a buyer sees and it's making them a promise about what's inside. If the cover looks low effort, they assume that the whole book is low effort. If it looks like it belongs on page one of results alongside the bestselling books in your niche, they trust it. You don't have to spend a fortune on this, but you do have to study what top selling covers in your niche actually look like. Look at things like colors, the fonts, the layout, and make sure that yours is in that conversation.
The fifth is tracking what's working and actually responding to it. Go into your KDP reports and find out where your money is coming from. Most people have a vague sense of which books are doing okay, but they haven't really actually looked at the numbers properly. When you do, you usually find that a small number of your books are responsible for most of your income. Those books are telling you something. They're telling you that that niche has buyers, that your cover works, and that your listing is doing its job. The logical next move is to do more of that. Publish in that niche again. Create a companion book, build a series, stop putting equal energy into everything, and start putting more energy into what has already proven that it can sell.
Now, I want to talk about something that sits underneath all of this because I think there is a shift in how you think about this business that happens when you do start making more money. When you're sitting at $100 a month, you think about books individually. Is that book selling? Is that one doing okay? You're measuring everything title by title and every new book feels like a fresh start. When you're at $1,000 a month, you stop thinking like that. You're thinking about your catalog of books as a whole and you start thinking, what niches are performing? What's my average earnings per book? Where does my next hour of work actually have the most impact? That shift sounds simple, but it changes everything about how you spend your time. You stop publishing randomly and you start publishing strategically. You stop measuring success by how many books you've put out, and you start measuring it by what your catalog is earning per month overall.
The other thing that changes is how you make decisions. At $100 a month, most decisions are based on gut feeling or something you heard someone else say worked for them. At $1,000 a month, you're looking at your own data. What is your BSRS telling you? What do your reports show? What's actually converting? And you start making decisions based on evidence rather than hope. And that makes a massive difference to how consistently you can grow.
And honestly, the last thing that changes is how seriously you take it. Not in terms of hours. Plenty of people put in hours and hours of work and still stay stuck. I mean in terms of treating it like a real business with real business decisions that have real consequences. The people that I see making good money from Amazon KDP aren't the ones who just got lucky with a viral book. They're the ones that did the research. They fixed their listings. They paid attention to their data and they made better decisions over time. That's it. That's the whole thing.
So, if you are sitting at $100 a month right now, here's what I want you to take from this. You don't need to change everything at once. Pick one thing. go back and fix your listings or properly research your next niche before you start building books or pull up your reports and find out which book is actually earning the most and figure out what to do next in that niche. Start with one thing and do it properly. The gap between $100 and $1,000 a month is real, but it's not mysterious. It's just the result of specific decisions and those are decisions you can make.
If niche research is where you want to start, my free report with 100 profitable KDP niche opportunities is down in the description. Grab that and start there. And if you did enjoy this video, YouTube thinks that you might like these ones, too. So, please go check them out to learn more about self-publishing your own low and medium content books on Amazon. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video.