Why Kindle Unlimited Is Killing Your Publishing Business

 

     Kindle is the best traffic source for ebooks hands down. There are a lot of ebook self-publishing platforms out there, but none compare to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (or KDP). It has has a reputation for making a lot of people money quickly and easily. But what you don't know about KDP or Amazon is that they don't have a reputation for playing nice with their vendors or publishers. Amazon over the years has taken a very hard-line stance at protecting customers. So much so that they even will terminate accounts with vendors and publishers over the smallest of infractions, or even worse, no infractions at all.
   
     Think of it from Amazon's prospective. You are profiting off of their platform and they take a cut of that profit. They have unlimited businesses who try to make money from Amazon's different services. If they feel that the customer is negatively impacted in any form, they will cut ties with your business.

     Let's take Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program. It is basically the "Netflix of books". Customers pay a 10$ monthly subscription to read as many books as their little hearts desire. You as the publisher, enroll your book into the Kindle Select program so that you can get extra profit from Kindle Unlimited members. You agree to only sell your book on Kindle in exchange for a second revenue stream. So now not only do you get paid sales, but you also get a second revenue stream for your same books.

     You get paid 1/2 cent roughly per page read of your book. Seems like a pretty sweet deal until you break down the numbers. Let's say your book is an even 300 pages. you sell that book for 2.99 in the Kindle book store. You are going to get around $2 per sale after Amazon takes their cut. Now lets say you get around 10 people to buy your book. You are going to net around $20 in profit. Now here is where the second revenue stream, KENP (Kindle Enrolled Nominal Pages) comes in. Let's say you get 10 people to download your book. If your book is 300 pages and they are valued at 1/2 cent per page, that gives you a total of $15 bucks! Here's the problem, of those 10 people, statistically only one will read the whole book. The other nine will read varying amounts but the majority wont read it past the first chapter, if at all.

     Out of those 10 People, you are looking more at around 500 pages read, or $2.50 dollars. Now take a look at things from a different perspective. If you were to not enroll your book into KDP Select and place your book on all the other platforms plus promote the book yourself from your own site (I show you how to do this here), Do you think you can make more than $2.50 dollars? I'm guessing you definitely can crush that number by selling your books on other platforms as well as selling it yourself.

     In the end Amazon wants content. Customers pay Amazon $10 per month to be a Kindle Unlimited member and they can't afford to pay you more than that per person without losing money. Amazon came up with a way around this by raising or lowering the per page payout and thus your profits and other authors profits. Amazon is essentially using your books for cheap content to fuel its Kindle Unlimited program.

     My suggestion would be to not enroll in KDP select anymore. In fact, My suggestion would be to sell your books on your own website and drive traffic to your website. You could sell your books at $5 dollars easily for a good quality book and there are tons of FREE ways to promote your books. You Keep 100% of the profits as well as 100% of the traffic.
When your book is on Amazon, its their website and they are out to sell everything and anything. You drive traffic to your books on Amazon, and they in turn post tons of stuff on your books sales page. "Other people bought this", "You might like this" bla bla bla. Its not your sales page, its Amazon's and they are going to sell on it. I could consider any money that you made selling your ebooks on platforms as Icing on the cake instead of the whole business model.

     You are selling yourself short so you can use Amazon's traffic. They don't care about you unless you are buying something. Buy into yourself and reach your full potential instead of scrambling for the scraps that Amazon was so gracious to leave you.

If Kindle Just Isn't Doing It for You Anymore...Try This!

UPDATE: Kindle Publishing Alternative 

Right now I am working on using CPA offers to sell niche items from a blog. To test This out, I have set up a small blogspot blog. I used one of my books from amazon that is no longer for sale. I put a content link lock on the book. If someone wants to get my book for free, they will have to take a survey. I then promoted the book like you would any from amazon groups. I've made $2.62 from doing this. I know its not much, but keep in mind, it is a crappy blog that has no real blog description for the book, nor am I writing up swipes for social media groups. I basically spammed the blog post to all the groups one time.
With a better blog, better call to actions, and a lot more books, I can scale this up to 100$ a day easily. Whats more, I can use the blog to build up an email list from pop ups right when they enter the site on a 5 second timer.
This would work too with any niche and it doesn't have to be books. It can be anything to download. files, games, PDF files, pictures, video... 

As you can see from this pic, the blog was started a little over a week ago and has generated 256 views to it. That was just from driving traffic from Facebook groups. With my 3k twitter following and my 20k instagram following, I'm sure I could really blow this out of the water. 
The CPA network I use is called www.cpalead.com. When I actually build a few blogs on this, I would use a different CPA network that has better pay outs. I converted on 2 leads for $1.30 each.

I see the only downside in this is the daily promoting of this site. I will be testing this on all my books just to see what kind of revenue I would get from it on a simple blogspot blog. Also, you are really going to want something that people are willing to take a survey for. It can't be boring and run of the mill books. Its got to be something that people really want to get their hands on. You also have to make sure you target the right groups for this as well. 

I might come out with a more technical manual on how to set up CPA offers behind link lockers if there is a demand for it. I might put it behind a content locker!

Little Known Ways to Get Massive Traffic

I know a lot of people want to know how to get email lists going. Now I am no expert in this but I have collected a fair few in my time. I am going to give you a method that I know works but I haven't done myself.

This method takes a lot of work but the good news is that its free. And when I say a lot of work, I mean its a lot of work. You are going to pick a niche. doesn't matter what the niche is, just pick one. We are going to be building a list of traffic sources now.

you are going to want to head over to doctor google at this point. we need every single traffic source we can find on the niche you picked out. I would start out looking for forums. in the google search type in "niche forums". write them all down and make sure you check them out. if they look pretty dead, you might wanna move them down the list of forum traffic sources. Do the same thing with "niche blogs". make sure you write them all down.

You are going to want to do this with all the social media sites as well. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, periscope, linkedin, snapchat, pinterest and whatever else you can find. you are going to want to join all relevant groups, accounts, or pins for your niche.

next you are going to want to go to "answer sites" such as Quora, yahoo answers, cha-cha and whatever other ones you can google. look up all the questions you can answer.

Most of you have a KDP account, but sign up for all the other self publishing platforms as well. You are going to want to have a few permafree books you can stuff your link anywhere you can in them.

Next we are going to put together a list of influential people in your niche. by this time you are going to know who the most influential people are in your niche, but in case you don't, again, doctor google has you covered. you want to get onto all of their mailing lists. you want to see what they are offering people so you can mimic success.

Up till this point is all free. You can skip below if you aren't interested in the paid section of this.

Ill keep this short, but you now have a list of the most influential people, you can now email them and see if they would run "solo ads" to their subscribers. You are basically going to pay them to email their lists on your behalf to get them to check out your offer.

You also have a huge list of social media groups and accounts. start reaching out to all of them and see if you can get some sponsored posts.

You have a huge list of forums. contact some of the bigger names in those forums and see if you can rent their signature.

You have a list of blogs. see if you can do a paid guest post that links back to your opt-in. contact those webmasters and see if you can do solo ads on their lists as well.

Head over to Fiverr.com, seoclerks(dot)com, and sourcemarket.com and pay for gigs that will promote your optin site. pay for gigs that will do social media marketing for you.

The granddaddy of all paid options is advertising on the major platforms. Google, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, Instagram, Twitter. Facebook advertising is the more favored these days.

You can also look into Media buying. This is were you buy banners from websites that drive traffic to your optin.

Head over to upwork.com and outsource some workers to do all of the manual work for you.

------End Paid Section-----

If you skipped ahead of the paid section, start here!

Alright. You have a giant list of traffic sources! You have to have a place to send them to now! You have to have an Autoresponder. You have to have a landing page. Now you can go with Mailchip for the Autoresponder, and a free site like blogger.com, but I really dont suggest it. Open up your tight pocketbooks and spend the money on the good tools.
For an autorepsponder, go with getresponse. Go with Aweber. It doesn't matter. The key is in the features that they both have. You have to set these autoresponders up with emails to send out. As soon as someone signs up to your list, you are going to want to have them in a que. The longer que of emails you have the better. I would send them out daily.
You also need a landing page. I would just go with Leadpages.com and be done with it. I really dont like website building. There is instapages as well you can go with. You can always create your own or buy a landing page as well. Just remember you keep it as simple as possible. hype up your free gift with a line or two and have an email opt in and that's it!
The key here is to make sure everything is top notch. You can make adjustments later to things, do split tests and tweak whatever later.
Next you need a free gift. This has to be stellar for your niche. Remember that list of influencers you have? remember that you signed up for all their email lists? What are they giving away? you need to be on par with them or even better then what they are giving away. This is where you want to kill them with value. Give them something very valuable in your niche and over deliver on it.

Now its time to wrap this up and put it all together. You have your traffic list. It should be huge! were talking a couple hundred different traffic sources if not a thousand. If you don't have at least 100 different traffic sources, you did something wrong. Even for smaller niches, you should have a sizable traffic list.
You need to hit this list hard! Its going to take a lot of work. Its going to be a lot of long hours doing boring things. Make sure you are being organized. keep track of all the forum, blogs, and social media usernames and passwords.

When posting in forums, blogs and on social media, make sure you are adding value. Don't just spam your opt-in link. try to solve a problem or direct them to where they can get value. say something like:
"I know what you mean, when I had that problem, i tried everything under the sun but what really helped was this guys site www.youroptinhere(dot)com. only guy who had the answer for me"

Check your opt-in rates every couple days. If you aren't getting any traffic to your site, you aren't doing a good job of posting your opt-in to your traffic list. If you are getting a good amount of traffic but you aren't getting any opt-ins, either your free gift sucks or your site sucks.

I know some people have seen close to 1,000 opt-ins in their first 24 hours of doing this. This works for every niche as well and it will never get saturated either. It just takes a lot of cold hard work, or cold hard cash. Either way you're going to pay.

If you found this valuable, please come see what else were doing here athttps://www.facebook.com/groups/levelupmastermind/
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Discover The Kindle Marketing Secret

I know a lot of you use Facebook groups to drive traffic to your books. I wanted to show you a different strategy that will be way more effective than just sending your amazon links in the Facebook groups.

Get some hosting and buy a domain. Honestly I would just buy your pen name as a domain. Lets say your pen name is, John Smith. buy www.johnsmith,com. if that's not available buy something like www.johnsmithbooks,com or johnsmith,info. Now you are going to make a blog post on each book you come out with. make sure you have a good pic as well as a really detailed post.
now you are going to go on to Facebook and post your new blog post from your own website to the Facebook groups. You also aren't just going to post a link. You have to use a whats called "link bait" and draw in peoples attention. In the files tab of this group is a "swipe" file that will help you get really good ideas on what to post to social media.
make sure you use a different "swipe" for each group you post in. I have never had problems posting to many, many Facebook groups because I don't cut and paste the same thing over and over. come up with 20 to 30 original swipes that you can cut and paste into the groups. start out at the top of your swipe list and work your way down. that way if you have 100 groups, you aren't posting the same thing to 100 groups. at most, you would post the same post 4 times.
This method helps you to stand out beyond the regular people who just spam their amazon links. If you want to take it a step further, you can have a pop up that has the visitor to your site sign up to your email list. make sure you give them something very nice for signing up to your list. Now you are list building in tandem with promoting your books.
you also have a web property now. Now you can put up links to some affiliate products. You could promote other authors works as well for a price. You can run adsense on your site to gain a bit of change on it as well.
Once your books get stale and you want to move on from that pen name, you can sell all your books as well as the site for a huge profit. If you have a single pen name that has say 10 books on it that do 100$ a month and a website that nets $1,000 dollars, you have 2k a month in sales. If you have 6 months months of proof of sales on the site making 2k, you could get 10x the monthly sales value easily. it wouldn't be unheard of to get 25k to 30k for that site. There are brokers who specialize in selling web properties who would love to get a hold of that site!
I know some of this seems a bit far fetched, but I know people who do this exact method in other niches. I know guys who do this and make a killing. I know a lot of you know the fiverr gig from "BKnights" and that's exactly what he does. he sells you a spot on his website and blasts his email lists. with my time doing Kindle, I paid him hundreds of dollars to promote my books.
Check me out at https://www.facebook.com/groups/levelupmastermind/
for more cool stuff on how to make money online!