Kindle Fiction: Is It Better Then Non-Fiction?

 

  I have decided to switch over to publishing fiction. I decided to do this for a bunch of reason, but mostly, I think I can build a better audience with fiction than I can with non-fiction. First off, I am focusing on building an ARC team. I personally think this would be easier with fiction then non-fiction. I am sure you can build up a great ARC team in any niche, but I feel that people are more passionate about fiction, and thus more likely to want to be apart of my brand.
      With fiction, I can create something new all the time. I can build up characters and story lines, plots and new worlds for my characters to grow in. I don't enjoy this same benefit with non-fiction. I can write a ton of new content, but cooking isn't going to change any time soon. Business principles won't change because I wish to write a new book.
      Fiction dominates Kindle. It's just the way it is. If you want a piece of that, you have to be in the action. I know how to publish a book and rank it well. I also know that these publishing ideas do not change from fiction to non-fiction, they are just altered with different keywords. I know some people will not agree with me, and no some extent, there is a difference with publishing fiction and non-fiction, but the core principles are the same.
      The great thing about all of this is that if you know how to build up an audience, do lots of menial tasks, and work hard, you can be successful in any niche. If you are interested in how I am building an audience, then come join me HERE!

      Come on by, say hi, drop me a message.

          Erik

Changing How You Get Traffic To Your eBooks

I have really been focused on traffic lately. In my personal mastermind group, I have impressed the importance of traffic. It is the life blood of any online enterprise.

I feel that I personally have been going about traffic the wrong way. From all the experts I have pooled together about Kindle Publishing, it has always been stressed to hit up FB groups. Build a Twitter following, Build your list etc... While all of things are important, I feel there is an overall better way of doing things.

First off, I couldn’t figure out why would I want to send traffic from so many different places to so many other different places? Why would I work my tail off sending my traffic to Amazon? I know that is where my books are, but all my books have different links. If I send someone to my link and they actually go, Amazon has all these distractions around my book! I might have just sent them to go buy someone else’s book.

I feel a blog is the best way to circumvent this. When you send people a link and ask them to read your book, it’s a lot like showing up at their house unannounced and soliciting them. It has that Jehovah’s Witness feel when you send them a link like that. I would just rather warm them up and prepare them for what I'm about to send them. That is what an article or a blog post can do for you. People are more likely to click on an intriguing blog post than an overstuffed keyword filled eBook title. I mean what would you click on, "7 Hot New trends in Internet Marketing! You'll never believe #4!" or "Internet Marketing: trendy trends that are trending ‪#‎Trends‬."

You also get the added bonus of having the biggest search engines working for you as well as Amazon. You will rank for your keywords in Google, Bing, and Yahoo just to name a few. Driving traffic to your blog is so much easier when you can have a better worded title that doesn’t need to be keyword stuffed like on Amazon.

Social media means a whole lot more to you when you can promote a blog posting instead of an eBook title. 7 Hot New trends in Internet Marketing! You'll never believe #4!" is great click bait if your niche is Internet marketing. People what to click on your link just to see what the hell #4 is.

Your blog post should be written as an informative article using your book as a citation. You are basically reviewing your eBook in your article and linking it to Amazon.

You will also be able to create an authority site which will be able to support different ads which will also make you money. People will come to your site to get info on whatever your niche is.

You will be able to review other affiliate products as well as your books to earn commissions. This is an obvious home run.

On your own blog, you will be able to integrate an opt in page a whole lot more places. Building your email list is the second most important thing in your publishing business behind actually producing books.

These are the types of things I have been working on with my clients and with my mastermind group. I have just recently opened it up for everyone who wants to join. I don’t know how long I will keep the door to my mastermind group open for so I would get in now.

Gain access now https://www.facebook.com/groups/levelupmastermind/

I would like to thank you for your time and reading this post. I hope you have found great value in reading it and I look forward to discussing everything with you guys!

How I Turned 5 eBooks Into a Small Kindle Empire In 3 Months

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!

Where to Get Niche Book Ideas For Kindle Publishing

It takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. If You want to be the next big basketball star, musician, or actress, its going to cost you a little over a year of straight dedication to your craft. If you want to be the best of the best in your field, its going to cost you 416 days of honing your skill. But what if you don't want to be the best? Well, in that case, its going to cost you around twenty hours of dedication to become proficient in a skill. So your not the best... but you can do it. With hardcore passion, you could knock that out over the weekend. What if you just want to know how its done? Lets say you don't even want to know how to do it, you just want to know how its actually done. It takes a couple of hours to learn the "In's and Out's" of a topic. If you're publishing non-fiction books on Kindle publishing, that's all you really need to be able to write a great and informative book to captivate readers and give them great value. 

If you are publishing a book, be it writing it yourself or having it ghost-written, you are going to want to have a passion for the topic. Challenge yourself to find ten topics that you feel you would be interested in and write them down. Now that you have your list of ideas, go to the Kindle bookstore. Let's say "fishing" is on your list. When you type in "fishing" into the Kindle search bar, it will suggest topics you might be looking for. In our case, the Kindle search bar is giving us a list of topics that we could write on. Pick a suggestion that you feel you are interested in and click on it. The Kindle bookstore will take you to the search results of the suggestion you clicked on. Now you are going to want to click on a few books and look at the sales ranking for that book. You want the sales ranking to be 50,000 or lower. With a sales ranking of 50,000 or lower means that people are buying that book. You want to find three books that have a sales ranking of 50,000 or less. If you are able to find three books that have a sales ranking of 50,000 or less means people are buying books in that niche. Congratulations, you just learned a method on how to pick a niche on in the Kindle bookstore. 

Oh crap! What if you don't know jack about fishing? You like fishing with your neighbor, but you don't know the first thing about setting a hook. Relax and take a deep breath. You don't have to be an angling expert to write a book on how to set a fishing hook. You only have to know how its done even if you couldn't do it to save your own life. 

I'm a visual learner. I see how its done, and then I can repeat the steps. The best place for me to learn something is YouTube. It's a great place to learn about something you didn't know before. Look up some experts on YouTube in the field you are writing about. Get a pen and pad and jot down tons of notes and before you know it, you have a great outline for your book. You now know enough about the topic to write about it yourself, or pass it on to a ghost-writer to write it for you. 

Your not a visual learner? You aren't doomed to watching endless videos on YouTube that drag on forever. This is the 21st century, and if someone has a passion, there is a forum online for it. Search out the top forums on your niche and get to work. Search out articles on your niche and start taking notes and learning all you can. In a few hours you should have a knockout outline from the info you gleamed from the forums in your niche. 

There really are endless ways to learn about topics to write about. There are millions and millions of websites on every topic. Libraries filled with books on a wide assortment of topics, and of course, the oldest way in the book...Go ask an expert in person. No matter the method you take, you'll have a great book that adds value to someones life and add a few coins to your pocket.