Transcription
$5,000 a month on Amazon KDP is not hard. And no, this isn't hype. This is math. And by the end of this video, you're going to see exactly why.
If you're at $0, $50, or even like $200 a month, and you're sitting there hearing that $5,000 a month is not hard, and you think that's ridiculous, this is exactly why you need to watch this video today. This isn't a tutorial. It's not going to be any step by step. This is going to be a conversation between you and me as if you were right here sitting on my couch in Mexico and you asked me, "Hey, Acca, is $5,000 a month even possible with Amazon KDP?" Not only am I going to say yes, I'm going to show you exactly how you can do it. And that's coming up right now. Let's go.
Hey everybody, it's Amecha here and this is the Publishing Academy YouTube channel and our goal is really simple to provide you the best KDP content for free so you can apply it and start making more money putting those profits in your pockets so you can choose to work with me and I can help you scale to 20, 30, 40, $50,000 a month with Amazon KDP like some of our students have.
So today is going to be a more relaxed video. You're sitting with me here on my couch in beautiful Tulu, Mexico, and we're going to talk about the different ways that you can hit $5,000 a month with Amazon KDP. But before we go any further, I want to make sure you understand who this video is not for. I'm not going to tell you this is like a get-rich-quick thing. You're not hitting $5,000 in your first 30 days. If you're looking for that type of info, sorry, I'm just going to disappoint you because this is not it. This is for people who want to treat KDP like an actual business. They're willing to invest in it in both time and money to do this business right so they have something that pays them for decades later, month after month.
The first thing we're going to do is we're going to break down how do you hit $5,000 a month? How many books does it hit? How much do they have to be making? There's a couple different ways that this can be accomplished. And if you're thinking that, hey, $5,000 is a lot of money, it's not when you break down the math. So, here's what it looks like in three different ways.
First off, we have the volume path. Now, this is typically by low content, low money coloring book publishers. So, we're doing lots of volume with very, very little profits coming in. So, to get $5,000 that way, you need like 50 books making $100 each. This is not my cup of tea. I am not a fan of this method at all, but it is one method that I know a lot of people use. And yes, it does work. It just takes a lot of time and there's just a billion downsides to it.
The second way is where most publishers end up landing. And it's more of the balance path. You have, let's say, 25 books making about $200 each. That's $5,000 a month in sales. Balanced. Obviously, we're doing averages this year because some books are going to make more. Some books are going to make less, but they're averaging out around $200 a month. You know, here we're typically doing medium to higher content. We're choosing better niches. We're choosing to create better high-quality covers. We're understanding how to run ads efficiently and profitable. And like I said, this is exactly where most self-publishers land.
Then there's the third option. The third option is the quality option. This is where your books are making about $500 or more on efforts. You have way fewer books because they take longer to make because they're higher quality. So, you're publishing less of them, but you get so much more from them. This is by far my favorite way of doing it. Cuz in this case, you only need 10 books making $500 each. You're at $5,000 a month. So, you're really focused in higher demand and higher competition niches. You're focused on improving your listing so it's like an A+ listing. You're investing a lot of money in your cover so it doesn't look like it was some AI slop and your review plan is solid. You're investing a lot into your books to ensure that you're getting the maximum return you can and you understand ads because you're using the KDP ad intelligent agent. So, this plan is the strategist plan and like I said earlier, it is my personal favorite.
Okay, so now we've looked at the three different ways that we can accomplish $5,000 a month. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about the mindset that it actually takes because you can't hit $5,000 a month if you don't believe $5,000 a month is possible. It's not that you don't believe $5,000 a month is possible because you've seen the testimonials. You've been all over YouTube. You're inside the Facebook and school communities. You've seen countless countless countless people absolutely crushing it with Amazon KDP. The belief issue is, can you crush it with Amazon KDP? Can you hit $5,000 a month with this business? That's the belief that we have to ensure is rock solid.
What you want to avoid at all costs in order to strengthen this belief is something called the publish and check cycle. What it means is you simply publish a book and then you do nothing. You check it in a week or two and it's made about $2 in royalties. And then what happens is you get so discouraged because you're not seeing the immediate results that you wanted right away, you quit. And that's the worst thing you can possibly do in this business or in any business in reality. If you're opening up a restaurant, you don't expect profit your first month. A real estate investor doesn't expect cash flow within their first month. KDP is like any other business. It takes a bit of time for that cash flow to start happening. You have to treat it like you would any other real business.
So, we have to shift the framework from asking the question like, "Okay, can I make $5,000 a month?" Obviously, you can, right? There's a ton of people a lot stupider than you making a lot more money than you. So, you can do it. Trust me. You have to change your thinking to, "Okay, how many books is it going to take me to make $5,000 a month?" How many books do I actually have? Oh, I have two books. Well, that's why I'm making no money. I need more books. And then it's like, well, what niches should I be in? Right? What niches have enough demand, have enough competition, right? And then it's, what price point do I have to price my books at to get a solid royalty? If you're publishing books and you're only making two or three or $4 per sale, guess what? Making $500 a month is a lot harder than when you're publishing books that are making you 7, 8, 9, $10 in royalties. That's the goal. So, you have to look at your business from that standpoint. And then ask yourself honestly, what do I need to change about my business in order to make it easier to hit my financial goals? Because I've seen it time and time again that there's publishers out there working hard doing all the wrong things because their emotions are driving their business because oh it's just I'll start with medium content I'll start with low content it's easier for me and then I'll transition to high content what the right makes zero sense if you know there's more money in producing these type of books why don't we skip the bullet and just produce those type of books why don't you just learn right there. It's just you're just delaying what's going to happen.
And the reason I speak so passionately about this is because this is what I did. I did coloring books for a year while my best friend who was absolutely crushing it with KDP like crushing it was like, "Why are you doing coloring books? There's like you can't make any money. It's like you're getting paid like $3. You can't run ads." And I'm asking him, "Why? Why don't my ads work?" It's so frustrating. None of my ads are profitable because you have no profit. There's no way you can run ads. And it wasn't until I made that shift and then I was like, "Oh man, he was right all along."
So, the goal here is to try to make this as easy as possible for you to make $5,000 a month. And yes, usually it starts with making a couple mental shifts first.
Hey, real quick. If you want to publish a book on Amazon and make money from it, I got this for you. I'm running a free 3-day publish and profit challenge. By the end of it, you'll have a book published on Amazon and making your first sales. I've been publishing for over nine years. I've published hundreds of books, helped thousands of people do the same. If you don't know where to start or you can't find a profitable topic or you just don't want to waste time or money, this is for you. Day one is finding your topic, creating your book title, getting your cover locked in. Day two, it's all about building your book. It's doing the research, creating the outline, and writing your entire book. And then day three, polishing your book, publishing on Amazon, and showing you how to generate your first sales. And this is free. I'm showing you the exact way to build this business without having to hide it behind a paid course. And to show you how simple this is, my 10-year-old daughter has even published her own book using this exact same framework. >> Actually, Daddy, I found this free. >> You're also going to get my free support group, and you're going to get the custom GPT that I built specifically to help you with this challenge. Just click the link in the description or go to publishingacademy.com/challenge. You'll get an email. It'll be the link to get to the school group in the classroom section. Everything's laid out. Go do it now. Like I'll give you an example of one of our students, right? When Robin started working with me, he already had some books published and he had paid a ton of money for another program and wasn't getting the results that he wanted. One of the first calls that we did was like a full audit on his entire account, his full ad account, his KDP account, everything. And we made a couple changes, but the biggest change when I talked to him like the following month, the biggest change was he's like, "I just added 20 more reviews and then my income jumped up $1,000 a month from that book." That was it. Cuz he was like, "Bro, there's like a hole here. You just need more social proof on this book right here, and it should start making way more money because everything else is aligned." And that's exactly what happened. And then he saw the business in a completely different way after that mind shift.
And then shifting gears and still going with the mindset is think about it like you're a farmer. You're not a gambler. The most successful publishers in the business, they don't think in terms of is my book going to make money in weeks or months, right? They're thinking quarters or years, right? A farmer doesn't just plant their seeds in January and then give up in February when nothing's happened and rip them out of the ground, right? They wait. February, nothing happens. March, nothing happens. April, maybe a sprout, but by July, they're harvesting. The same thing happens with this business. You have to be patient. The more patient you are with the right amount of urgency, but the more patient you are, the more money you will make in it, guaranteed.
Every book you publish is a seed that will grow over time. You might not see that in its first six months. You might not even see it in its first 12 months, but I have literally seen books that I've published two years ago start selling in its third year. So, take a look at this screenshot. This is a book we published on November 2023 is when we published it. Okay? It started making a little bit of money that holiday season, right? You can see a small little bump there, but it didn't start making real money until it looks like October, November 2025. 2 years later. 2 years later. And then what did it start doing? It started making $400 a month. And now it's consistently selling at $400 a month every single month. Now, why? I don't know. Who knows? Who cares? It's selling. That's what matters. But if I wrote that book off and said, "Oh, got mad or unpublished it or whatever the case is," I wouldn't be having what it's doing now.
And this is something that I see so many publishers land into this trap with. Look, you publish a book and it does nothing in the beginning. That's okay. The market might shift towards that angle that you picked. It's not doing anything for the first 12 to 48 months, but then all of a sudden like the market shifts and that becomes like the new interest or whatever the case is and your book now starts selling. See, every asset that you place on Amazon compounds more and more and more, right? Because what was I doing during all that flat time when it was not selling? Was I checking it every single day and asking myself, "Why doesn't this business work? This is so frustrating. I suck at this." No, I was just publishing more books. That's it. I was publishing more books and more books and more books. I was learning. I was getting better. I was figuring things out. I was asking for help when I needed it. I was inside the groups asking questions. And then things started picking up. And now I don't need the extra three grand this book has made or four grand this book has made, but it adds to my account on my already successful other books. And that's why this is exactly why there's a saying, the rich get rich and the poor get poor. It's because the rich don't stop working. We keep going. We keep publishing. We have one setback, one failure. We just go through, do the next one, do the next one, do the next one. That's it. This is how you win. You don't stop. You just keep going.
And what's so cool about this business is you can literally turn like $5,000 a month into an exit of 200 grand because you might not even know this, but you're building assets on Amazon and you can go to websites like Empire Flippers, for example, and sell your account to somebody who buys businesses, right? You might be thinking, "I would never buy a KDP business." I'm 100% with you. I have no clue why these people would buy a KDP business. I just think that's just such a dumb thing to buy. But guess what? There are people out there with hundreds of thousands of dollars who like to buy KDP businesses. So if you want to exit your KDP business, you don't have to have it making $10,000 a month. My KDP business when I sold it was averaging somewhere around it was like 42 or $4700 in profit, I think. Like so not a ton by any means. And that sold for $230,000, I think, somewhere around there. Not bad. Not bad. This guy, I'm putting him up right now, Trevor, we'll call him. He sold his KDP business as well for just over 200 grand. And then what did he do? Took some time off, started a new business just like me, another KDP account, and built that one back up. And he's absolutely crushing it, especially over at TikTok right now. Killing it. So you might not be thinking about selling this asset, this collection of assets that you have right now on Amazon, but it could be a great way to exit and then you take that money and invest it into whatever you want, maybe a bigger business or something like that down the road. So every book you produce, whether it's a winner or a loser right now, doesn't matter because it's an additional asset that goes into your portfolio of assets that somebody else sees more value in.
Now, before you say, "Amecha, that's easy for you to say. You got super lucky with your niche selection." And I remember I saw I saw a comment on YouTube by like a keyboard keyboard warrior. It was like, "Oh, this guy doesn't even know how to pick niches. He just published a random book and then made a whole bunch of money with it." Okay, that's partially true. That's partially true. That coloring book, I just randomly spewed it out and yes, it just blew up for some reason. So, I I'll give you that. But guys, niche selection, hitting a couple thousand dollars a month with your books isn't luck. It is developing skills over time that make people think you're lucky, right? How do you get good at niche selection? Do you get lucky selecting niches? No, you don't. Every single book I produce now, it's 100% guaranteed to make money. 100%. Why? Because over the last decade, my niche selection skill has become laser focused on exactly what to do to make money. Right? You suck at book covers. Okay? You don't need more luck getting a good cover designer. You need to increase your skill level on cover designer or on choosing cover designers. That is a skill that you just have to increase. Right? You suck at running ads. You hate running ads because you suck at running ads. Well, what you have to do is ads aren't going to get easier, but you can improve your skill level. So, ads look easier because you know more about running ads now. And in order to get better at business, that's all you do. You can't get better at business. There's no such thing as like, "Oh, you're really good at business." No, it's like, "Oh, this person is really good at product creation. This person is really good at marketing. This person is really good ads ads/marketing. This person's really good at hiring freelancers. This person is really good at blank." It's all of these little things individually that create this person's really good at business. And those are all skills every single one of us has to develop at some point. And the faster you develop those skills, the faster you make a lot of money.
So ask yourself, do a self-audit. What skills do I suck at? What areas of the business don't I like? I used to hate running ads. Hate it. Couldn't stand it. It drove me crazy. Chest pains just like hated running ads. Ads are my favorite thing because I got really, really, really good at learning how to run ads. How did I do it? Every single day for 30 minutes for 3 months straight, every single day, even on Sundays, I looked at my ads dashboard and I tried to see what the hell's going on with all of these weird numbers. I do throw screenshots into chat. This was long before we had like an ad intelligent agent to help this. But like, I got good because I made it a mission to get good at running ads. You can do the same with every single part of the business. Period. The only thing stopping you is you.
And guys, the fastest way, the fastest way to learn skills, it's not by watching YouTube videos. It's by paying people to show you how to improve your skills at a stupid rate. Right? That is why you buy a course. That is why you pay money for something. So somebody can say, "Hey, I've done this before and here are all the mistakes I did. So let's not do any of that. Just go do these things because that's going to get you the fastest ROI." That's why you buy a course, right? That's why you join a free community so you can ask questions and other people inside those communities can say, "Whoa, don't do that. I tried that. That didn't work. Do this instead." And so instead of you having to guess and fall on your face, you can just take what they're saying and be like, "Oh, wow. Here's a shortcut to success." And you find a faster way of doing it and you up your skill level like that. And everything that I've talked about with one book in a proven niche that covers all of that. That all starts with one book. It starts with your first book. And if you're a beginner, you haven't published yet, or you've published a couple books, but you want a little bit more structure, I have a free 3-day publish and profit challenge where you can get your first Amazon KDP book published and making money on Amazon in just 3 days, completely for free. Click it. The link's in the description. Go sign up. But make sure you come back to this video because you're not going to want to miss the last two things I'm about to talk about.
And one of the best things about joining that free 3-day publish and profit challenge is you get a free community of people who are committed to succeeding with Amazon KDP because the environment and the people that you surround yourself with will dictate how successful you're going to be. And so you want to make sure you're in a positive environment where people like helping. They like answering questions. They won't judge you based on what your question is. Get around people who are making $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 a month and ask those type of people questions. I love it. Like one of our students the other day came on to a coaching call and she was talking about how she's connected with a publisher who makes over a million dollars a year and that's freaking awesome because the gems and the things that they're going to be able to share with her is going to help her business improve and grow and that's super exciting. But you have to commit to the business. Like I said earlier, this business is not a business that's going to get going in three to six months. In three to six months, you might just see a sliver of success. It might be so small you can't even measure yet. But what's so cool about this business is when you commit to it for 12 months, okay? You It's not like you go from like in the beginning you go from like, yeah, $30 a month to maybe $100 to like maybe like, you know, $900 a month, you know, and then maybe $1,500 a month. You crack a thousand finally, right? But then all of a sudden it can change. It can go 1,500 to 5 grand in a month. Like it's not linear, right? There's exponential growth that starts happening because everything just starts compounding on each other. And your skills that we talked about earlier start compounding. First it's like book creation skill, right? It's creating that skill and then once you have that skill then you start working with another skill. Maybe it's like an eye for a good cover. That skill and then now you have two skills and you need a third hand. And then you have like another skill that starts compounding and all these skills start compounding and then boom, you're at like 5 grand a month and then boom, 10 grand a month. Like I've seen that time and time again. Your next month could be bigger than your last six because everything starts compounding. You just can't stop.
And the last thing I want to talk about here, guys, is when you're stuck, ask yourself why five times. "Why am I only making $200 a month?" Ask yourself that and answer honestly. It's like, well, because my books didn't sell enough, right? That's why you're making $200 a month. Then, okay, ask yourself, "Why didn't my books sell enough?" Well, because I don't get enough traffic. "Why am I not getting enough traffic?" Well, because I'm not running really good ads. "Well, why am I not running really good ads?" Because I don't like ads. "Well, why don't I like ads?" Because I'm not good at ads. Oh, you're not good at ads. What can I do to get better at ads? Boom. Now, we've identified the skill that's causing you not to surpass $200 a month. And you can ask that, and it can go in a lot of different directions, but just keep asking yourself why until you find the core reason that's preventing you from succeeding. Because it's always going to be a skill deficiency. It's always going to be a skill deficiency. And the great thing about that is if it's a skill deficiency, it means you can teach yourself to improve that skill, which means there's nothing holding you back from success.
$5,000 a month isn't hard, but it's not easy, but it is simple. And that's the difference. A simple path is clear. Pick good niches, create great covers, run profitable ads, publish consistently. Don't stop. There's no mystery. There's no secret here. There's no hack. It's just repeating a few things over and over again until you reach the financial goal that you want. Something that's hard means it simply requires discipline. It means showing up when your dashboard says zero. It's publishing your 15th book when your first 14th all flopped. It's running ads when you would rather not spend money because you know it's the right thing to do and it's the only way you're going to learn how they work. The system works, but it only works for the ones who believe in it and in themselves.
And if you don't believe me, I want you to go watch this video right here. Brian came to me frustrated. Over 15 books published, not making any money, losing money on ads, but he committed to the process and is now making over $8,000 a month within his first 12 months. And he did all of that while working a full-time job, being a husband, and raising a bunch of kids. It's not luck, guys. It's just math, skill, time, and commitment. Everything we talked about, Brian did it. He's proof. Go watch his story. There's going to be a link in the description for the free publish and profit challenge as well. Go check that out. Can't wait to see you in the next one.