You may already have your books on KDP but it is not generating sales. Learn how you can get a fast KDP income growth.
Jessica told me she was considering giving up completely and not even bothering to finish writing her second book. That's the reason why I'm putting out today's article on fast KDP income growth.
So it was several years ago and one of the people who was going to soon be my coaching client, Jessica, had put her very first book onto the market. The thing was that with KDP, she wasn't getting any sales on her Kindle books.
He hadn't even come as far as even putting out the paperback books. Not realizing the close relationship and how you can make a lot more money if you have the paperbacks. But she figured she would just start with the Kindle books alone and see how well that worked.
She was seeing no sales at all and so she wanted to see the sales coming in. But the question was what exactly did she need to do? She also realized it was incredibly important for her to get her motivation up.
Because she was considering at this time that maybe she should not even bother finishing her second book. Whatever she was writing, nobody seemed to want it. So perhaps she just wasn't a good enough author.
So the first thing she decided to do was maybe another round of re-editing of her book. So she had already edited it many times before she even got the first book onto the market. Because after all, she wasn't going to see any sales if the book had mistakes.
That was also a mistake on her part. She didn't understand that we don't need an infinite round of edits. We do need to get rid of all the major mistakes in the book.
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But some of the top resulting books have mistakes in them. I tell you, I regularly read a book every single day. Usually, two books a day, not fully but reading two different books on any given day.
I find mistakes regularly but for some reason, I keep reading these authors. So it's not a game-changer. But she thought that by re-editing it, she did that.
She took it through another round of editing. Then reformatted and put her book back on the market. It had no impact at all, Jessica wasn't seeing any of the results that she was hoping for.
So the second thing was that she came up with a really clever idea. She had heard of many authors who would hire somebody on Fiverr to do some of the promotion for her book. The key was they had promised that they would get her book onto all of these social media areas.
They would post her book to their thousands of followers. That would somehow drive the sales. So she had paid her money on Fiverr and got in the queue.
She was excited to see what would happen. The fact is she put her book out there on the market. They started running ads and running these promotions against her book.
Putting in all sorts of Facebook groups. The only problem was it had no impact either on the sales that she was looking for. So that created another problem which was this idea that now she had wasted time and money editing.
Doing A Coaching Session
She had wasted time and money getting promotions done. She was getting close to giving up at this point. That was when she started watching some of the material that I was putting out.
I was talking about this exact subject of “how to go about doing it?”. So she decided, “let's do a coaching session”. She paid for the session and we started.
We discovered very quickly the issue of keywords. I asked her “what keywords are you targeting with your book?” She told me “what do you mean by keywords?”.
“I just wrote a book and just put a title on it. I don't understand what you mean.” And that was the point where I clarified to her the importance of knowing exactly who your audience is.
You have to understand that even though you think you're just writing a book, you're actually getting into sales and marketing. If you wish to succeed at this whole writing thing. Unless you happen to be one of the miracle people.
Who writes a book and is found by some publishing company. Then they make you big. Even though you've somehow managed to not pay any attention to any marketing and sales rules when it comes to your book.
But the thing was that she wasn't even familiar with the role of keywords. That was when I showed her how to use KDSpy. We took a look at her book to figure out exactly where it was to be placed.
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We were looking at her competition. For example, like a book on Puppy Training, we'd say “puppy training” may be a keyword. But you may have some longer words like “puppy training to protect poodles”.
That would be like a long-tail keyword where you have this keyword that goes out the long distance. And it makes it easier to compete with other authors and other people who are also writing on the same subject or same topic.
So we took a look and noticed she wasn't using any keywords inside of her subtitles or titles which are incredibly powerful. The reason is that people are searching for books all the time on Amazon. When they search for these keywords, we need your book to show up at the top.
Without even running advertisements, people are putting it towards the top. They're clicking on it and it's giving us more chances to actually hit a home run with our book. This keyword issue is so important even if they don't find us by searching.
When they finally do get to the book and they see the cover and the title of the book, it will flag to them that yes this is the kind of book I'm interested in. So the first thing we did with Jessica's book was we got the title changed.
We changed the title to incorporate the keywords. That we found was the most profitable using KDSpy. Now for some books, it's going to be difficult because if you choose some niches nobody is looking for them.
So for example, if your book is about How to Feed Your Anteater, nobody is searching for that keyword. If you search KDSpy, you'll find nobody is searching for it. There's low competition, and no sales are being made on it.
Seeing A Huge Bump In Sales
It would be bad in terms of the money being made on this keyword. You may know everything there is about feeding an anteater. But the fact is nobody's going to buy the book.
Because there's just not enough of it on the market. That's the mix we're trying to find. We're trying to find keywords where there are a lot of people buying those books.
There should not be many books competing for that keyword. Then we put our books into those areas. Just because you have written a book doesn't mean it's too late.
So for Jessica's book, it was a little bit of a stretch. But we were able to move it to transition this book into a specific niche that would be very profitable. At this point, we started running ads against the book.
So we went and started using a tool called Publisher Rocket. Using this tool, gave us the keywords we were going to need for the ads. Lots and lots of keywords that are related to our initial keyword that are making a killing.
In addition, with Publisher Rocket, we found the categories that could be added to her specific book. And now we have a combination in place. Running the ads we'd see the impressions, and how many people are seeing the cover of the book through the Amazon ads.
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How many people are clicking and of those people who click how many people buy? This information suddenly gives us the thing. So she did find it a bit of a challenge.
Though working through these tools, we discussed them in the coaching sessions. How exactly to best optimize and use the tools to succeed? In the end, she managed to get it all in alignment.
She did not hit a homerun but she did manage to see a huge bump in sales. Something she did not see by doing additional rounds of editing or hiring somebody. Like some people offer as much as some of these hybrid companies a thousand dollars.
So that they will just post your book across social media. As opposed to what you need is to make sure that the keywords are aligned. You're running ads against it and we're focused on getting a target market for your specific book.
But she saw a book we have in mind and she suddenly realized that it wasn't about the quality of her writing per se. Her quality was just fine many edits ago. She didn't have to do as much editing as she thought she had to do.
It was the marketing on the book and this was something she remembered. And as a result, she was motivated to actually start going on her second book.
So my question for you is what things have you tried in order to get a bump in sales for KDP for your book? Do you know other ways that would lead to fast KDP income growth? Let me know below in the comments.