There are a lot of things that greatly contribute to your book sales. Here are the factors that matter most when trying to sell KDP eBooks.
Jenny was considering giving up completely on putting out eBooks any longer since she was seeing absolutely no sales. That's the reason why in today's article, we are going to discuss Factors That Matter Most When Trying To Sell KDP eBooks.
Jenny is from Australia and she's a writer of romance novels. Normally, with romance novels, lots of people buy the eBook version or the audiobook version of these novels.
The problem is that for her specific novels, she wasn't getting any traction on the eBook versions of them. She wanted to see more eBook sales. She was seeing paperback sales but the eBook sales for some reason were not coming through.
She wasn't sure what the issue was since the paperbacks were doing this. She was losing money on the eBook sale. She began to wonder if maybe her readers just didn't like ebooks.
That was the issue. She is wasting her time even bothering to put out Kindle Direct Publishing eBooks on Amazon. She first went and she put her eBooks out on the market.
When she first heard about this particular strategy of making sure that you are selling eBooks. I had a coaching client just yesterday who does not have any ebooks of their book on the market. She doesn't fully understand what exactly is the problem.
But in her case, she understood the eBooks were an important thing. So she put them on the market. She priced them at the same price that she had her paperbacks.
Because she figured why anybody would want to lose value. Why would she want to lose profit on it? Since the value being delivered is about the same on her paper books as it was on her eBooks.
But that did not change her sales. She was still making absolutely no sales. The next thing she did was she changed the formatting on her eBooks thinking that maybe it was the font, the size, the colors, or these sorts of things that she was using.
That could create a challenge. So by changing this around, maybe that would motivate people to purchase her eBook. That also had absolutely no effect on the entire process.
It led to a lot of frustration for Jenny's brother. So the thing was that she downloaded my free Self-Publishing Secrets Checklist. She was working through it.
Check out this related article: Is Amazon KDP Worth It?
I was describing a number of the techniques and strategies incorporated in eBooks. As well as these other things like the tools and things that I use. When self-publishing these books on the market.
So she started going through some of this and realized that she needed a little bit of help. That's when she booked a free Discovery Session. And when she booked this session, we were able to sit down and take a look at her books.
In particular, selling your ebooks on Amazon KDP. That is the key to winning. The first thing was her pricing, she was selling her Kindle books for around $19 to $20 apiece.
She figured since she was selling her paperback book, that should work just fine. Now that was complete nonsense. Because the fact is her book should be selling at $2.99.
It's a misunderstanding of the nature of why we sell eBooks. It’s not about selling eBooks, it’s about pushing our paperback book sales. This is something that so many authors get wrong when it comes to getting their books to sell.
It is the fact that when we put the eBooks on the market, it's going to show a price cut through the paperback sale. Showing you 90% off for example. Your eBooks can be gotten for only $3.
The second thing which is where the power strategy comes in, it's when we are running ads against these eBooks. Notice I didn't say eBooks and paperbacks but just the eBooks by themselves. Then what happens is a person sees $2.99.
They see the cover and the amazing title and so they click on it. Now, they're on the eBook page and see the marked-off price like “wow this is a really good deal if I act right now to get this book”.
And then they will read the description. They look at the author's bio. They may look at the other books that are on sale by the same author.
They go through all of these different steps as they're pushing themselves closer to making the purchase. Then they realize maybe I'd like a paperback version since this book looks so good and then they buy the paperback.
Building The “Know, Like, And Trust”
Now, notice the key to getting him into this funnel, it's like a funnel that pulls them in from the outside. Coming down in the funnel as they're working through the sales page and these different things.
It was the price of that eBook that was initially the trigger point that got them into it. Then they sell themselves on the book that they're going to purchase. And at that point, they buy the paperback.
So we're using eBooks to sell paperbacks. But the pricing on the eBooks is incredibly important. I was telling Jenny she needed to make sure that the price was never more than $2.99.
We're using eBooks to sell more paperbacks. Also, there will be people who only want to buy eBooks. The second thing is making sure that the formatting on these books is exactly correct.
The reason I originally went to Fiverr and Upwork is to get people to do the formatting of my books. Until I realized that I was going to need a lot of changes and also their table of contents didn't work.
The colors, when I went to a dark mode or nighttime mode of my phone, suddenly everything looked incorrect. That was because they were hard-coding the colors. I think it was blue for example in the table of contents and the text itself is completely worthless.
So I went back to them and they were willing to revise. But then they came back with other mistakes that were made with the formatting. That was when I realized I needed to do it.
I tried Scrivener originally and then I moved over to Jutoh which I teach my students. How to do formatting and get your book perfect. I guarantee to come through flawless.
So that was one of the things that many of my students have found. By working through Jutoh, they're able to get it done. And for some students who have difficulties, I will even take that book.
I will help them get that thing into the tool, format it and fix the errors. So that I 100% guarantee that we're going to get the book formatted. You know, if you're willing to put in the time to just work through that process.
And so we get the eBook exactly formatted. Once it's in the Jutoh tool, we flip a button and we can print out the eBook. We flip another button, we can print out the ones for our hardbacks, our paperbacks, IngramSpark, KDP Print, and all of the different formats.
We're going to need it no matter where we're publishing this book, we're going to be able to get it through Jutoh. So that was the other thing, making sure that the formatting was correct. Because her formatting was slightly off in the book.
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She had hard-coded colors. The same mistake that I've seen previously done before. That can be off-putting to readers who are looking at your book.
Then the next thing which is one of the factors that matters most when trying to sell KDP eBooks is running ads against it. She had never really even considered running Amazon ads.
I pointed out after having run 120 million impressions. It’s what I've got on my ads over the years in the UK and the US. Running both of those and pushing them through.
I started to realize that there are some tricks here when it comes to ads. These Kindle books play a very critical role. Your Kindle books and your paperback books are separated in those ads.
We sell them separately. And if we ever lose $2 on an ad, we kill the ad. We start the bidding price at 15 cents a click.
We set a budget of a minimum of $1 a day per ad. It loses $2 total, we kill the ad. So it's just that simple.
I can tell you the ads alone have been incredibly profitable over the years. This was something that Jenny had also not tried and not implemented. Because we had problems with the eBooks and running the ads to the eBooks.
Then getting the formatting correct on the eBooks. And also understanding that eBooks are about selling paperbacks. Because we made most of our money off paperback books in the old days.
Even the audiobooks would even make more money than the paperbacks. Well, now it's the paperbacks. Then the final thing is using eBooks to collect emails.
Jenny’s comment was “why in the world would I need to collect emails?”. The answer is that those emails are going to give us the ability to connect closer with our readers. To build the “know, like, and trust”.
It takes seven contact points before people are ready to purchase anything from us. So we're going to need to have contact regularly when we come up with our next book.
They're going to remember us from our first book. There was a book titled Top of Mind that I read several years ago that directly addressed this issue.
Having That Slingshot Effect
When a person thinks of us, let's say in Jenny's case it would be: she was doing romance novels. When they think of these what she was doing, we want to make sure that they think of romance novels. They think of her right up front.
The only way they're going to do that is if she's holding regular contact with her readers. As they're collecting emails. Your email collection will be done through an email service provider like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign which is the one I use.
Also other ones like Aweber which was the second one I went to. It is a little bit pricier than ActiveCampaign and ActiveCampaign is just easier to use. So we use it to set up a form so that we're able to collect emails.
You don't even need a website, you can have it directly with the forms. Then we're collecting those emails in exchange for something free she was giving out. Jenny realized that she could just as well give out a very short story from her romance universe that she's writing in exchange for the email.
Then they can ask these people to help her with leaving reviews for her books. Also in terms of helping her edit the books in the future. Like in terms of Beta-reader versions, right?
These same readers would be more likely to purchase her books as she comes out with them. And with the ebook versions on Amazon KDP Select, we can set them up for promo days. For 90 days if we only sell eBooks through Amazon.
We are then able to go free for five days. To increase the number of people who are downloading for free, get on our email list. Learning to know, like, and trust us and then buying our other books in the series that we have for these books.
This is one of the key power strategies of how we can use eBooks to build our email list. Build our customer base and get better feedback from our books. Get reviews to drive traffic to sales on the paperbacks and also drive sales to the eBooks themselves.
Because of all of the flexibility and the things that we can do with these ebooks. So this is the power circle. This circle of things, these exact tips here are exactly the tips that are necessary to get your Amazon KDP eBooks to start selling.
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The beauty of it is that the format they're using now is no longer Mobi. They've moved over to EPUB which is the same format used on all of the other sites. So when we want to do a polar book out of KDP Select, we'll have the option of putting it under Draft2Digital for example, and selling it that way.
So there's an awful lot of things to do. But in the case of Jenny, her starting point was just getting my free checklist. And then booked my free discovery session.
That was the key to launching her particular journey there. But the thing was she still wasn't seeing sales once she left the thing because she hadn't implemented it. So what did she do?
Set the price to $2.99 and she started studying these free promos. To generate leads, she also changed the contents of her book. She added her free short story to get people on her email list.
She started getting in one-on-one contact with her readers. So that she could have a better idea of what exactly she should do for her future books. To make sure that she was exactly giving people what they wanted to read when it came to her books.
As a result, she started to see an increase in sales. People joined her email list which also then asked them directly to start leaving reviews. It was booting up the number of reviews that she was having in her books.
It increased the number of sales. And also when she threw in this Amazon ads component to it and put it 15 cents a click, she was able to use that to drive traffic to her eBooks and sell more paperbacks.
It ended up like a slingshot effect in Jenny's particular case. She started seeing massive growth across the board in the sales that she was making. As a result of implementing the correct strategies at getting her eBook to sell on Amazon KDP.
But then she asked me the question which was How To Sell eBooks Without Going Through Amazon! That's the reason why I told her you definitely want to check out my previous article.