How I Sold Over 50K Books Self-Publishing

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I sold over 50,000 books by doing three things and repeating them: choosing the right market, optimising each book, and running Amazon ads. Here are the mistakes I made first and the steps to copy.

Why didn’t my first books sell?

I put my books on the market with the easy steps of publishing a Kindle book and assumed they would sell right away. I was wrong. After a year I still wasn’t getting the sales I hoped for. People read and enjoyed my books and gave positive feedback, but the sales weren’t there. I started to think self-publishing was a losing endeavor, where you sell a couple of books here and there and the golden age is over. I even looked at trading currencies for a while, but the charts made no sense to me. If you worry about a slow stretch at the end of the year, read will book sales dry up by the end of the year?

My friend Vincent told me about a training on Amazon ads. I had never taken a training or invested in myself. I thought I could do it the cheap way by figuring it out alone.

Can you figure out self-publishing yourself?

It’s not a good idea. You do need to try many things, but without the right strategies you lose. When I took the training on running ads, my sales went up. More importantly, it showed me that people who have done it before bring a lot that helps you succeed.

I took more trainings and learned new strategies each time. I joined communities where people shared strategies freely. My sales went from 1 or 2 a day to 10, then 20 a day. That is when I realised you can win this game.

Since then we have seen over 50,000 sales. By choosing the right niches I saw I did not have time to write all those books myself. So the strategy is to write on what interests you and hire other people to write on other topics. Optimise the books, get sales going, keep the machine running and enter new markets. I still try new strategies to push results higher. If you want to see who else made it, read who the 15 famous self-published authors are.

What are the three steps?

1. Choose the right market. In the wrong market you lose. Choosing well is a skill, and being part of communities helps. I help people with this on my YouTube channel and in coaching.
2. Optimise your books. Don’t expect to sell with a poor cover, a bad title, a terrible description, or contents that aren’t put together logically. A poor cover means they never buy. How the information is organised can matter more than the information itself, though content matters because readers need to be happy with what they bought.
3. Run ads. You need a marketing campaign and you have to pay to get sales. I tried going cheap, and if you do it for free you get nothing. Think of it as a seed: you put it in the ground and wait, and one seed gives you many more. Amazon’s Sponsored Products ads are cost-per-click, with no upfront fees, and you set a bid and a daily budget (Amazon Ads). Read Amazon ads for authors.

How long should I run an ad before I judge it?

Give it weeks, not days. Each ad first goes through Amazon’s review, which its guide for authors says typically takes 24 hours but can take up to three business days, and the same guide recommends running seasonal campaigns for at least four to six weeks (Amazon Ads for authors). A few days of numbers tell you little. Set a daily budget you can afford to lose, let the campaign gather data, then cut what does not sell and keep what does.

What is the secret?

Repeat this over and over. Choose a market, optimise the book, run ads, and do it again.

Self-publishing can work for you. Stick with it and keep learning. If you want a guide to go through it with, book a free 25-minute discovery call.

How many books have you sold? What strategies have worked? Tell me in the comments.

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