Transcription
[Music] In today's video, we're going to go over 14 things I've learned over the past couple years doing Amazon KDP that will give you an unfair advantage with your publishing businesses. Let's dive right in.
My name is Ken. I've made over $130,000 on Amazon with paperback books and sold an additional 8,500 audio books. And on this channel, I just give away all the things I've learned over the past couple years.
So, tip number one is don't underestimate a good title. I feel like a lot of people just create generic titles explaining what the book is. And although that does work fine in many scenarios, when you are competing with other books and they all have the same title, it's going to be hard to actually stand out and sell books. So, what we want to do with our titles is spark an emotion and most importantly, tell them what they want to hear. Tell the customer who is looking for our book topic that our book is going to solve the problem they're looking to solve. And ideally, we're going to solve that problem easier, faster, and better than the competitors are going to.
A perfect example of this would be the book The Chat TBT millionaire. So this book has been selling for a long time. It was published around the Chat TBT boom and I personally think it has a really ugly cover and even the subtitle is not very explanatory or very good. But I think the reason that this book did so well is the title itself, the Chat GBT millionaire. So when the big chat GBT book boom was happening, people went to Amazon looking for books to learn about the product and this book was right in front of them. It really hit them emotionally because these people are hearing about this new thing ChatGBT. It's a revolutionary tool. They get to Amazon, they see the book, The Chat TBT Millionaire, and they're most likely just going to click and buy this book impulsively.
Tip number two is don't be afraid of competition. If your competitors have anywhere from 1 to 400 reviews, that's fine. Even at 75 or 100 reviews, you can still compete with books that have 400 reviews and there's more than enough sales to go around. It only really matters when the books have 5, 6, 700 plus reviews, then it's hard to compete with. However, if a book has 1 to 400 and yours has 75, if you have just as good, if not better, of a title and cover, you're going to get a lot of sales that otherwise would have bought the other book. And so, if your topic is saturated, as long as there is demand, just make a more desirable offer and package it better than all the other books. And you'd be surprised how well you can sell and beat out the competitors if you just have a good title and cover. Reviews, of course, are important, but they aren't everything. The offer and the packaging is.
Here's a perfect example of this. Two books on the topic of starting a business. We have how to start a business and we have million-dollar weekend. So, both talking about how to start a business. However, one is very clear with the promise. It's very clear with the emotional response it's trying to spark in the customers. And even if this book had way less reviews than this one, I'm sure this one is going to get a lot more attention, a lot more clicks, and a lot more interest. Captivating an audience that is already there and beating out your competitors is way easier than trying to sell a book no one is looking for. So don't be afraid of competition and go to a topic that has no demand. Just go where the demand is and just make a better book than the ones that are there.
So tip number three is don't give up too soon. I feel like a lot of self-publishers will get let's say 20 to 40 reviews on their book. They don't have the best few months and then they basically give up. They either move on to the next book or they just give up altogether. But the important thing to note is we can't give up too soon on our books. If there are other books with low reviews anywhere from 75 to 100 that are selling well, you can too. And so it's just about getting our book to that point to allow ourselves to actually sell. So like I said, don't give up too soon. Get more reviews for your book. If you're launching your book and your book is discounted, keep it discounted for longer to continue to drive sales and push your book up in the rankings. Update your cover if your ads aren't performing well. A simple updated cover can drastically change the performance of your books. And continue to run your ads even if they're unprofitable. Our ads are just used to allow our book to rank high and stay relevant. And so don't give up on them too soon. Just continue to push your book to the top of the rankings. Get enough reviews. Update your cover if you have to and see it through until the end and do not give up too soon because like I said, if there are other books that have, let's say, 100 reviews selling well, ranking high, then you can too. You just have to see it through to the end to get there.
Tip number four is high content isn't saturated. What I mean by that is if you go to any high content topic, go and look at the books that are there. I guarantee you 90% of them on page 1, 2, 3, and 4 have bad covers, boring titles, low reviews. Are they even launching their book properly? Do most people know what a book launch is? And they're just overall bad books. And so, why would they sell? And why would they even be your competition? And so, when I'm deciding if I should publish a book in a topic, and I'm looking at the competition, I'm only really looking at the top two rows because the top two rows of books on your search term are the books that of course have the most reviews. They launch their book properly to actually get that ranking, they most likely will be selling consistently. And those are the books that we're going to have to compete with. If there's a book at the bottom of page two or even the bottom of page one with 20 reviews, kind of an old school ugly cover, their title is boring, why would that even be your competition? And so, yes, high content is saturated in the volume of books that are there, but the actual books that are competition is few and far between. And so, don't be afraid of a keyword that has lots of books. Just go and look at the top two rows, maybe even the first page, see what books are there, and see if you can realistically compete with them. And if there's only two or three rows of books that are actual competitors, then it's safe to say the topic isn't that saturated, and we can easily compete with what's there.
Tip number five is low content books are not beginner friendly. Yes, this might come as a shock. You might disagree with me, but I personally think that low content books are not beginner friendly when it comes to Amazon KDP publishing at all. And let me show you why. Let's look at what it would take to make $1,000 a month from a book. So, when you're looking at a low content book, let's say a coloring book, your average royalty is going to be anywhere from $2. Let's compare it to a high content book, which is going to be an average royalty of about $6, maybe even more in some cases. To make $1,000 a month from the low content book, we have to make 17 sales a day, 500 sales a month, and average at 12,000 BSR every single day. Now, this is only $1,000 a month, and not including any ad cost. So, this is an extremely low BSR, and it's very hard to maintain. When it comes to the high content book, however, you only have to make six sales a day, 167 sales a month, and average around a 38,000 BSR to make $1,000 from that book. Now, 38,000 BSR is very, very high. It's not that hard to get this. This is only what, six sales a day. So, you have to make triple the sales with your low content book to make the same amount of money. Not only that, but the average cost per click for your advertising is virtually the same. And so, you're spending so much more on advertising compared to how much you're actually making for royalties. Basically, unless you have a 100% conversion rate, your ads are not going to be profitable with the low content book. And most importantly, you have to understand that low content is extremely saturated. It's so easy to make low content books that people just pump them out like crazy. And like we already talked about, yes, high content has some volume as well, but because the books are harder to make, the actual quality of books is very low. And most books are not even your competition. And so yes, low content books are beginner friendly in a sense that they're easy to make. But when it comes to actually selling and making profit from them, they're by no means beginner friendly. They have low royalties. They're extremely saturated. They have really high ad cost. And to actually make a profit with low content books is one of the hardest things to do. And so what I do like to say is low content is easier to make yet harder to sell. And high content is harder to make it easier to sell. And so if you are struggling with your Amazon KDP business and you just want a clear step-by-step system to follow with help and guidance along the way, I will leave a link to a video below which will outline exactly how you can get both those things.
So tip number six is use AI. Take advantage of AI to make your book creation process a lot easier. I'm sure a lot of you are already doing this. However, if you're not, definitely utilize things like Chat GBT. Not only their text, but their image generation as well. The new version of Chat GBT has really good image generation. You can use it for marketing. You can use it for book covers. Whatever you'd like. So definitely utilize this in your book creation process. And most importantly, use ghost writers alongside AI to write your book. So if you are creating high content books, the urban writers actually have a package where you can get a writer write your book alongside AI to use it to help them out. And it's drastically cheaper than an actual ghostwriter who writes the book themself. So as long as your book has been edited, proofread, it's high quality. There's nothing wrong with using AI. And that's the most important thing here is quality.
Tip number seven is don't over complicate Amazon ads. This is a common theme I see is yes, Amazon ads are complex, but at the end of the day, just keep them simple. Don't have campaigns that have thousands of keywords and don't have campaigns where you have to sit there optimizing them every day. It's not going to be fun. It's going to be a headache. And so, a simple campaign strategy would be you have launch campaigns. This is where you have your broad keyword campaign targeting all the broad search terms for your book topic. You have a broad product campaign targeting all the broad products in other books in your topic. And maybe even an automatic campaign after you've launched your book for the first 30 days. From there, just simplify your campaigns to your maintenance campaigns, the ones that you could run for a long period of time and are a lot more sustainable to manage. And these are just going to be the best performing keywords from your launch campaigns. And the best performing products from your launch campaigns. So, you can basically just have two campaigns targeting the best performing keywords, even if it's anywhere from four to six. And the best performing products, same thing, anywhere from four to six. And just keep it simple, easy to manage, targeting what's relevant for your book, and just ensuring that you can actually make some profit out of the end of the month.
Tip number eight is organic sales is the only way to go. Let's go back and look at this example here of making $1,000 a month. As you can see, the average cost per click for ads nowadays in Amazon, it's very expensive. You're spending anywhere from $1.25 to $1.60 per click. And in the case of low content books, unless you have a 100% conversion rate, you're probably not going to make any money. And even with high content books, you have to have a very, very high conversion rate to actually make profit with your Amazon ads. So in this case, let's say we have a book that is $14.99 and has a $5.67 royalty. If we go into chat dbt and ask for our break even a cost, what our a cost for our campaigns have to be to actually break even, it's going to say it's going to be 38%. So 38% is a very low a cost, but this is where we have to be to actually make profit. Anything above 38% is going to be unprofitable. And so realistically to make good profit from our ads, our a cost has to be anywhere from 20 to 25%. Which unless your book has 200 plus reviews is very hard to get. And so let's say we spend $300 on ads and make 300 royalties, which is very common here. We're going to break even. You're not making any money. However, if you get an additional $400 of organic sales, you just made 400 bucks. However, your ads are break even. And so when you aim for organic sales and you ensure that you are publishing in topics that have high demand, you can rank high on page one, it's going to be almost easy to make profit because even if your ads are unprofitable or breaking even, you're still in the green every month. And so if you're only relying on Amazon ads for your sales, for every single one of your sales, it's going to be virtually impossible to actually make a decent profit. And we have to aim for organic sales if we want to make money from our books.
Tip number nine is relaunch every 90 days. So what this means is we want to keep our books relevant and ranking consistently. So we tell Amazon that people actually want to buy our books and we don't lose our spot in our ranking. And so what I do is something called the 90-day relaunch. Basically all I do is every 90 days I essentially discount my book. For high content books, I go back to $9.99. I do a free promo from the marketing tab of your KDP dashboard if your book is enrolled in KDP Select. On this free promo, I use it simply to drive some free downloads as well as I use it to do a bit of a review push because it's easy for people to download the book for free and leave their feedback while it being a verified purchase. From there, I change my ads from my maintenance ads back to my launch ads, which are going to be a lot broader. And basically, all I'm doing is driving sales to my book because it's discounted. I have some broader ads. What this is going to do is just keep my book relevant in the rankings. And if I'm not ranking super high, it might boost my book up to the top of page one. So, if you're doing this consistently every 90 days, it's just going to set your book up to sell consistently and consistently almost tell Amazon that people do want it and Amazon's going to keep it relevant in the rankings.
And so, tip number 10 is shiny object syndrome will destroy your life. You can succeed in anything, whether it's Amazon KDP, whether it's drop shipping, whether it's affiliate marketing, anything you can think about that has been done already, you can also do and succeed with. However, if you try different things every 3 to 6 months because you didn't have success in that time frame, you will literally attempt to make something out of your life forever. You will never accomplish anything. And so, the key to actually succeeding in anything is just to pick something and do it until you win. That's it. Because all of these things, these online business models, whatever it may be, they've all worked for somebody. They've all worked for a handful of people. And so, if they don't work for you, it doesn't mean that they don't work. It means that you didn't push far enough and see it through to the end to actually get the result that you were looking for. And so whether you want to do Amazon publishing or something else, the important thing is you pick something, you ignore everything else and you just do it until you figure it out. That's honestly the secret to success.
Tip number 11 is one book is better than three. What do I mean by this? I don't want to have three books that all have 30 reviews. I would much rather have one book that has 90 reviews. Sometimes the reason books don't sell is because you never pushed them to the end. You never saw them through with the reviews, with the launch, with the ranking. And so what is going to unlock Amazon KDP for you is seeing your books through until the end and actually putting them in a position to sell. Because let's say you have a competitor that has 100 reviews, they're ranking high in your search term. They have a strong title and cover and they're selling super well. And then there's you who maybe you're ranking on page two. You have 30 reviews. You have a generic title and cover, why should you even sell? You haven't even put your book in a position where it realistically should sell. And so before you write off your topic or write off Amazon KDP in general, make sure you're actually seeing your book through to the end and putting it in the position of a book that should sell. Because if you're not even at that point, there's no reason why your book should make money. There's millions of books that get published through Amazon every single year. And we can't expect to just publish any book to Amazon and it sells. We have to post our book, make sure it is desirable, make sure there's an audience for it, and make sure we launch it properly, get it to enough reviews for social proof, get it ranking high in our keyword to actually get seen, and put our book literally in a position where it should sell. If a book is not in that position, there's no reason it should sell.
Tip number 12 is your book is only a small thumbnail. So, if someone can't read, understand, and want your book in 2 seconds or less, good luck selling any. You want to design your title and cover with this in mind because most people searching on Amazon are just on their phones. They're scrolling through their phones. They're glancing at books. We can't assume that everybody is going to go to each individual book in the topic, read it slowly, understand it, and decide which one they want the best. They're just skimming through, and they're going to pick whichever one sparks an emotion first based on what they're looking for and the ones that stand out. And so we need to design our cover and title with this in mind and make sure that people can see it, understand it, and actually want it in only two seconds.
Tip number 13 is Amazon only cares about making money. If we tell Amazon that people want our book from getting sales, if we tell Amazon that people like our book from getting consistent reviews that are good, and if people continue to buy our book, we have consistent sales over time, Amazon will keep our book ranking and relevant. And so Amazon's algorithm is a performance-based system. And the reason it works like this, it's not because Amazon's greedy. It's because, like I said, I believe it's around 1.4 million books get published on Amazon every single year. There simply isn't enough for all these books to get seen. And so, it's obviously going to prioritize the ones that show the most potential. The ones that get launched, they sell well, they get good reviews, they have good clickthrough rates on their ads. The ones that perform the best will win. You don't need to be an authority figure to do this. You just need to understand this and ensure that you're launching your book correctly. You're driving sales to it. You're making it desirable and you're seeing it through to the end to prove to Amazon that people want it. And when you prove to Amazon that people want your book, it's going to rank it for the long haul.
Tip number 14 is follow a system. If you're just randomly spraying books out there and hoping one sticks, you're going to be running in circles forever. You need to at least understand what you're doing and continue to optimize each time and build out a system that works. So try publish books after you publish them. Evaluate. If it didn't do very well, see what the problem is and go to the next book and improve on those things that you fell short with and build out a system that works. And once you hit the nail on the head every single time with your topic, your cover, your title, your reviews, your launch, there's no reason why your book won't sell. And most likely it will. And so if you don't want to do that, if you don't want to go through the trial and error, then find somebody who's already done it and go and steal it. Go and steal their formula and just steal what somebody who is succeeding with Amazon KDP is doing. And so if you want to learn my exact system, there will be a link in the description. You can go and watch that video. It's going to walk you through my exact Amazon KDB process, how I actually make money from my books, and how you can get some help with your own self-publishing business. That's it for this video. We'll see you in the next one.