Transcription
Here's what everybody gets wrong about pricing [music] on Amazon KDP. On my screen, you see how much I earn with one sale of one of my best-selling books. I get $19.43 for each sale. That's not the price of the book. The book is way more expensive, of course. That's the royalty of my book. So, I get $19.43 for every single sale. I, not Amazon, I get that. That's more than double of what the average publisher earns with his books. And also more than the total price of most publishers' books. So, a lot of publishers price the book at like $15.99, and my royalties are $19. So, you see, I get more royalties than a lot of people have the total price of their book. And of course, it's a funny comparison. A lot of my books also have lower royalties, but I have multiple books having over 10 and also over $15 in royalties. And in this video, I will show you why I do that, why that works, how it works, and how you can maybe also use this strategy.
So, how is this possible? What do I do differently to be able to have such high royalty amounts? A few words about me, my name is Andre Bernhard. I'm an Austrian self-publisher who moved to Cyprus. I started KDP in January 2024, so around 2 years ago. Um I've earned $44 in my first month with Amazon KDP, and I earned $123,000 in my best month on KDP. I reached over 500k, I think it's now over 600k in lifetime royalties in only 2 years. Published over 50 books in these 2 years, and I'm the co-founder of the software Publish Flow. I have three insights that I want to share with you in this video. The first one is never be the cheapest option. The second one is the price of the competition doesn't matter if your book is unique enough. That's the most important point. The third point is try to create the biggest or best and most expensive book in the market. You don't need to do that, but that's one of the methods how you get these high royalty rates. Why? Because that's my secret on how I got these plus $19 in royalties for one sale. So, let's get started.
First point is why do higher prices work? The main reason is just human psychology. So, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not an expert at that. I have a lot of business and sales experience. And one thing, one pattern that you see when people are looking to buy something, is that the price alone has an intrinsic quality. So, if the price is high, a lot of people will just think that the product is valuable. Why? Because why it's so expensive. If you have the same book and the book costs $12.99 or $19.99, then a lot of people will see the $19.99 and think, "Okay, this book has to be better because it's more expensive. And there needs to be a reason why it's more expensive, else nobody would price it higher than the other book." That's how a lot of people think, of course, not all people, but enough people for this to work. And that's the baseline. That's why this strategy works, because a higher price implies a higher quality.
If you now use this psychology hack, I will just call it now. If you use this in combination with a better cover, so that your book also looks more high quality than the competition. If your book now also has more pages, if it's also maybe color instead of black and white. You don't need to do this, but that's also one argument for a higher price. So, if the higher price is now combined with actually higher quality, then it also justifies that that it's a higher price for the for the reader, and they would be more even more willing to buy a book for $29 instead of $19 or even for $39 or $34. So, you can get up these higher price ladders by making bigger books, making them with color, um and also just pricing them higher because psychologically, a lot of people want just the most expensive book because they care about quality, and they think if that's the most expensive book, that has to be the best quality book. Of course, it also only works if you have good reviews. If all the reviews are negative and just write the book is way too expensive, then nobody will buy it. you have an actually good book and a higher price, that's really well.
Then the next point, benefits of higher prices besides the obvious, besides you earning more. First of all is the upward spiral. Being able to spend more on ads gives you higher organic ranking, which gives you more sales to spend more on ads to get you even higher higher organic ranking. So, you can spend more money because you earn more per sale. If you compare your book against the competitor, the competitor makes $7 in royalties, and you make 15. You can spend more than double than he can spend to make one sale. So, you can bid double for Amazon ads for one click, and you both need the same amount of clicks to get one sale, but you are profitable and he is not because you have just a higher royalty rate. You can spend way more money on Amazon ads, but also on Facebook ads, on Meta ads, and so on, on every kind of advertisement, because if you can outspend the competitor, you will be the one who ranks the highest. And if you can outspend them on the ad front, so with paid traffic, you will get more sales through paid traffic, which increases your organic ranking, and then you will also get more sales with organic traffic. And that's why upward spiral effect of having more royalties than the competition is so huge.
In what situations that won't work is a lot of giftable books and kids' books. Why? Imagine how a customer thinks about buying books on Amazon and how many books they buy. And if they buy giftable books and kids' books, they often are not willing to spend way more because they need to buy maybe 10 books. They need to buy two books. Let's imagine they have three kids, and they want to buy two books for each kids. That's six books. Maybe they also have the kids have cousins and friends, and they have birthday parties and stuff like that. So, a parent has to buy a lot of books. Some parents buy 30, 40 books a year, not just for them or their kids, but also for other people to gift them away. So, a lot of people will have a a high spend on books per year if you compare that. And that's why all of these giftable books tend to work less effective with this strategy. But it also depends on what is the value that book provides. If it's a book that helps their child learning something, for example, if their kid is bad at math, and it's a great book, really um detailed book, also colored, that has great reviews, and is promising a lot that is the best solution to help their child to get better at math, a lot of people would be willing to pay $20 or $25 or $30 if the book looks really high quality and promising to fulfill that need. But if it's just giftable, if it's just a gag book, the person who buys the gift book knows, "Okay, it's not about reading this book, it's just about giving it, and the person is then happy, and most likely no one will ever open this book." A lot of gift books work that way. They are just funny, the concept is funny, the cover is funny, and people like it when they get get this book as a gift, but they don't really do something with that book. The value of these books is making people happy and not educate or inform them. It's just a gift. And then it doesn't really work to just price it higher and make more content because it's not about that. It's about a great cover, and it being a great gift. So, you need to differentiate. But for a lot of books, and more books than you maybe imagine, this just price it higher and make it better philosophy actually works. But that's the caveat, that's for giftable books and kids' books, it works harder. It's more rare that this strategy works.
Now, the issue is people will attack you. Being the most expensive book opens up points of attacks by your competitors. Maybe you've seen one of my videos where I talk about my points of attacks. I have defined 12 points of attacks. When I analyze a niche, I do niche research, I have these 12 attack points, and I analyze all of them in detail, and based on them, I will then decide to go into a niche or not. You can also click on my channel and watch the video. I will also link it at the end of this video. It's great recommendation, in my opinion. So, people can steal your unique concept and make the same book, but cheaper. So, they can just copy your book, maybe even copy your cover, and just price it cheaper, and that will steal a lot of sales from you. People will still buy your book because your book is established, it maybe has more reviews. By the time when people copy you, it also is more expensive. A lot of people just like to buy the more expensive product because they think it's higher quality, as I mentioned in the beginning. But if someone is cheaper, it will definitely steal sales from you if he has copied your concept and your cover. This is a real problem, but you normally have around 6 months until a serious publisher tries to copy you. Why that long? Because normally, it takes two to three months for them to noticing, and then if they really want to create a book with the same quality as your book, they take another two to three months to produce that book, and then create everything and publish it. So, you normally have 6 months, maybe four to six months. Because most fast copycats are bad in terms of cover, review management, marketing, and content of the book. They are not really a threat. I know when I published one of my first travel guides, I think 5 days later there was a competitor with a really similar cover. The content was just black and white and all they had written really fast. I think it had 90 pages or something. But it has the cover nearly copied from my book. It didn't have success, of course. A lot of copycats like this are on Amazon and most of them aren't a real threat because it's just some cheap-minded self-publisher who wants to make quick money, but that's not how we operate. It's not the mentality that I would recommend anybody to to use in self-publishing. But, and that's the biggest threat to you, other serious publishers can see your book and may try to attack it. This maybe takes months, as I said, 6 months, 4 to 6 months. But, as soon as they release, they have a great advantage over you when they did everything correct and just priced the book cheaper. If you are at 39 and they priced the book 29, so $10 cheaper, they maybe still have $10 in royalties. So, you of course have still the royalty advantage. You have way more royalties than they have. You have maybe 15, they have 10. But if they had have everything else in the same quality as you have, maybe they even have a better cover because they tested their cover against your cover. When they are a good advanced serious publisher, they can do that and they will do that. And then they just are $10 cheaper and have a better book. And then it's it's hard for you to argue your higher price point. Still, a lot of people will buy your book because it's higher priced than people buy higher priced stuff because they think it's better. But, not all people, not most people. And that's why it's a real threat and it's a real attack point you need to think about.
And here comes the last point of this video into play, which is really essential for this strategy to work. You need to defend yourself. To defend yourself, you need to make sure to build other defenses that balance out the higher price. If you watch my video about the points of attacks, if you haven't watched [clears throat] it, watch it off. This video highly recommended because all the 12 points of attack I point out are also defense mechanisms. Because all the points of attacks, for example, reviews. If you have more reviews, that's a defense mechanism to defend yourself on your book from people who want to attack your book. Because if you have 1,000 reviews, that's a great defense for your book because it would need them years to get to these numbers of reviews. So, everything that's point of attack could be on the flip side also defense. If a competitor has reviews and sells a lot, that's a point of attack because they are weak at reviews and if you get 100 reviews or only 30, if you get more reviews than they have, you can compete with them on the review layer. But if they have 1,000, you can't really compete with them because they have a really strong defense mechanism. So, each point of attack I talked about in the other video is also defense mechanisms. But the most important defense mechanisms I will talk about now.
So, the first one is get many organic reviews with high quality. In my very first video here on YouTube, I also talked about my Facebook ad strategy, which gives you high quality reviews. So, that's a great video to watch. Well, they also just recorded a new video about my organic review strategy. This will be published after this video. So, like and subscribe to not miss the next video because there I show the number one organic strategy to get endless reviews. So, that will be really interesting and I would recommend to then use the strategy that I will show in the next video about how to get organic reviews. Because the goal is, as soon as you are established and this strategy works through the higher pricing that I'm talking about, if that works, you will get a lot of sales. A lot of people, if you do it right, will review your book. And then long-term, you will get past a hundred, past the two hundred, five hundred, or the thousand. And as soon as you have 500 plus reviews or 1,000 plus reviews, it's really hard to attack your book. Not only that, it's also intimidating. A lot of publishers don't even try because they think, "Okay, if this bestseller has 1,000 reviews, it's not even worth for me to try to attack this book." So, not even can they attack you, even if they try, they fail, but they won't even try because it's just looks you are too well defended for them. That's why all of these are important, but especially the review defense is one of the most important ones.
Then the next one, make sure you have the best cover in the niche and stay the book with the best cover. That means as soon as a new competitor pops up, test the cover again. So, I talked a lot about this. Before you publish a book on KDP, the most important thing to do is to make cover survey. You need to test your covers against the competitors, else you are blind. You don't know if your book can compete if you don't do a cover survey. That's the most important thing. Only if you win the cover survey, publish your book. But if the new competitors come, if they are advanced publishers, they know this. They also test their covers against your covers. And they only publish when their cover won against your covers. But here comes the extra effort that most publishers, even the advanced one, are too lazy to do. And that's as soon as a new competitor comes up, you test your cover again against them. And then if you lose, you improve your cover, update your cover, and then only if you win, you publish the new cover on Amazon. And then you have again the best cover in the niche. And that's one of the strongest defense mechanisms to have because a lot of people judge the book by its cover and will buy the book because it's the most beautiful based on the cover. Not most beautiful, but it makes something with them. When they see the cover, it's exactly what they, as the target audience, would appeal to most.
Then the next defense mechanism is just create a product with such a high quality that nobody wants to make the effort to attack it properly because your book is just too good and too hard to execute. Then only lazy people will attack you with really bad books and you don't need to be concerned about them. High quality is one of the best shields you can have if you are the first one with a unique concept in the market. If you have a book with 400 pages and each page is packed with value and it's insanely hard to compete with, maybe even with graphical elements, with a video course on top of it, with an app and other bonuses on top of it. It's just so many value, it's such a great product that nobody takes the effort to try to attack you. Because even if you're the first book, it's normally worth to make this big effort because there is no one that's also has this and you know, you can anticipate that if you are in a niche with a lot of competitors that sell well, but you have a unique concept and to emphasize this unique concept, you make a great book around that concept with bonuses around that concept and you publish that, you can anticipate it has a very high likelihood of becoming one of the bestsellers or the bestsellers of this niche. And if then a second person wants to compete with you on the same concept, he needs to also create a better product to really be able to compete with you. Of course, he can make a better cover, so the cover is an important element and also get more reviews, so that's why the reviews are also important element. But besides reviews and cover, the content of the book and also how you frame that, how you show that on your A+ content, for example, is really essential. So, a high quality book that's just extremely hard to create is one thing that is a great shield for you.
Then the next thing is build a brand. Publish more books in the same or a near niche that support each other. If you created this this really expensive book as the first book in one niche, just publish more books. And as soon as you have 10 books, people are just also too intimidated to go against you because they know, "Okay, if they publish a book in this niche, they not only have to compete with one book, but with 10 books or with three books or with 50 books." I know some people who have hundreds of books in one brand. So, if you build a brand and publish multiple books in the same or similar niches, that's also very intimidating and hard for the competition to to compete start competing with and start attacking because you have so much external traffic through other books, through cross sales. Maybe also with an email list, which I also emphasize a lot. So, you building a brand is also a great and very powerful defense mechanism.
Then the last one is use external traffic sources to strengthen your organic positioning. If you're good with social media, you can try TikTok, but most people struggle with that. So, what's more predictable for me, at least, is what I do is Facebook ads because they are more predictable. Even though they don't work for every book, if they work, they feel like a cheat code. It feels a little bit unfair. It works for like one out of three books. Facebook ads work, not for all books, as I said. But when they work, it's it's really unfair because you don't need to spend a lot on Facebook, but you will be rank one in your keyword if you do Facebook ads right because Amazon just loves external traffic and Amazon will will give you the first place just as a gift because you bring new customers to the platform. So, external traffic is really powerful and that's also one defense mechanism. Even if another person gets another book and tries to attack you, if you are consistent rank one organically in your niche, it's still hard for them to to compete with you. So, that's on the on the ranking front on Amazon. External traffic is is really powerful as a defense mechanism, too, because American publishers, at least, don't know how to do Facebook ads for their books. So, that's why it's really effective.
Now, that's it. If you want to see my 12 points of attack, as I said, all of them are also defense mechanisms. So, I now mentioned 1 2 3 4 5 out of the 12 as defense mechanisms. If you want to see the other ones, plus how you can use them to do your own niche research to find a niche that has gaps to then create a book like this, maybe with a higher pricing, like I explained in the beginning. Maybe with a book that you don't need to aim for $19, that's really the highest I personally have. Also, if you have $8, $9, that's a lot. If you have 12, 13, 14, that's also a lot of royalties. So, just aim to price your book higher, aim to price them higher than the competition, make the best book in the niche, and you will have a lot of really nice benefits. If you now want to watch the video about niche research, how to find a niche where you can position a really expensive book in, then you feel free to click on this video. It should also pop up somewhere here. Thank you for watching.