First off, I would like to preface this with yes, I am going to promote myself. I want to get that out of the way right off the bat. I have a great story to tell along the way, but alas, I really just want you to buy my books. Actually I want you to borrow them.
Visit my Author Profile for Amazon Here!
My journey takes place a lot longer than three months ago. I have always been a fan of Internet Marketing. I treated it as an interest that I would one day pursue or a hobby I liked to dabble and daydream about. Along the way I have tried a great many things in my vain attempt to make money online. (For you marketers, I used the keyword “make money online” when I really didn’t have to just to increase my keyword count.) I don’t want this to come off sounding like a sales pitch because honestly I rather like my story. Suffice it to say though, that I did try a lot of things in the Internet Marketing realm and some of them I’m not so proud of. (As a devout Christian, I even tried uploading porn for paid sign-ups until my morality grabbed hold of my common sense and beat the tar out of it.)
I stumbled across Kindle Publishing Direct, or KDP earlier this year and instantly fell in love with it. I am an avid reader and call myself something of a writer. (I suck.) There was something about Kindle Publishing that really called my name. I guess it was the idea of publishing some of my works as well as running a business all in one that really sold it for me.
This is where my Journey for this Reddit post begins. I published my first book in July and had mediocre success in the publishing world, but as an author it was a complete bomb. I didn’t have a clue on what I was doing even with my Internet Marketing background. I doubled down my efforts and went to work researching everything I could on Kindle Publishing Direct. Like any sane person does after searching for minutes with no luck, I went to YouTube. I told myself I was going to look up videos on KDP but really I wanted to check out funny cat videos. I availed myself to search out KDP after a few small hours of hardly laughs, (damn cats get me every time!) and came across a guy who was somewhat of an expert in KDP. I rabidly watched every video in record time.
This actually took me quite a while to do in reality as he had over 50 videos on KDP and most of them were 20+ minutes long but that doesn’t make for good writing. Over the course of a month I started applying some of the strategies I learned from YouTube on my lone book. I learned how to target a keyword instead of a category to increase my sales rank. I learned something else that really increased my sales. Kindle Direct Publishing had just recently changed their payout structure which really hurt a lot of people. They packed up their businesses and went looking for greener pastures. I found this to be a great opportunity.
KDP used to pay people two ways. It would pay you for whatever direct sales you made at whatever price point you set for your book, as well as anyone who borrowed your book through its Prime membership. People made a killing by having their eBooks borrowed by Prime users and it was a win for everyone but Amazon. Big Daddy Amazon of course made changes and wrecked everyone’s free lunch. They changed their borrowed structure by starting a new program called Kindle Unlimited. Members pay 9.99$ a month and basically get to Netflix books. It changed from paying per borrow (which was around 1.35$ per book the lucky bastards) to paying per page read (which is around .0048$ now….mean face!)
This is where my empire truly formed. If you have an eBook that is 300 pages you’ll get about 1.44$ granted the person who borrowed it reads the entire thing. But here’s the catch, most people don’t read past the first chapters of even very popular books (I still haven’t finished the Hunger Games!) You need to get the reader to the end of the book to get all your pages read.
I applied one of the strategies I learned from YouTube and offered the reader another eBook right off the bat. I made a pretty and shiny red button that was clickable and said “FREE!” and placed it right below the headline “Get My eBook ‘insert eBook title here’ Now!” The Button would take them to the back of the book where they could click on a link which would take them to a landing page where I collected there email address so I could send them a copy of the eBook as promised.
I don’t know if you saw what I did but it was a huge gold mine which makes me a lot of money. When someone clicks on the link it takes them to the back of the book. It actually counts all the pages as read! I have to take a minute here and place my own interjections in here. I emailed Amazon to see if I was actually allowed to do that and it was encouraged! As per Amazons TOS they want you to have a clickable (Hyperlinked) Table of Contents. I asked them one more question, do they allow Boxsets or Collections of books in one book. When I got the “affirmative” from Amazon that, Yes, I could box up my works of writing into one eBook that’s exactly what I did.
I started writing my other four books. I don’t know if you know this, but if you have 5 eBooks there are 20 different ways you can package them, (One book can have 4 others in it, totaling 5 complete books in all.) Some of the overall page lengths for these books are 1,500 pages long. That combined with my Free gift at the front means a 7.20$ profit for me. I make around 1.44$ to 7.20 every time someone borrows my book and collects their free book. The books retail for 2.99$ so as you can see I’d rather you borrow my books than buy them.
There is one subtle thing that was missed in all of this which makes up over half of my income and that’s the email addresses I have collected. There is an Industry standard in Internet Marketing that states “each email address should account for 1$ a month in sales.” Thus far I have collected over 5,000 emails. Now I will say that I don’t make 5k a month from my email list (spammers really do profit). But between my Kindle sales and my email profits, I don’t have to work a conventional job.
Yes I am planning on scaling up my business. No I’m not going to coach you. Yes you can do this too. Those are the three most common questions I get when I breach this topic so I thought I’d just go ahead and answer ‘em now. I would ask that you support me though and borrow my books if you are in Kindle Unlimited and collect your free gift while also putting some coin in my pocket. I do have expenses to cover such as an autoresponder (30$ whole dollars a month) as well as junk food I eat while providing you with great value, (and for the more ambitious readers, an income.)
Visit my Author Profile for Amazon Here!
