How long have you been publishing on KDP and how much do you know about it? We will be unlocking KDP’s darkest publishing secret now.
Today's article has three points and you're going to want to stick around. Because the third point is a secret as to one particular thing you should be doing to drastically increase the sales of your books.
That's one of the reasons why in today's article, we are going to be discussing Unlocking KDP's Darkest Publishing Secret! By the end of this article, you're going to know exactly what the darkest secret is. You're going to have the steps to avoid the consequences of this particular secret.
You're going to feel great that you're not wasting your time writing books that are never going to sell. I can tell you that it had been difficult when I first got started. But after putting out 200 books onto the market through Amazon KDP, it begins to get a lot easier.
But one of the things for a lot of people is sitting down and driving somebody you can go back and forth with who's done this. This is one of the reasons I always offer a free discovery call.
If we've never done one before, I've never done Coaching before, then have a free discovery call with me. Where we can sit down and go through exactly your book. For more information on this free Discovery Session, just check that out and I will get started right away with that.
So, the thing is that Henry was one of my content marketing students. He went through the Content Marketing Made Easy Course. He was trying to increase sales of his book.
But the challenge he was dealing with was specifically that no matter how much content he put out on his specific book using exactly the steps that I have within the Content Marketing Course, it wasn't moving the needle.
The question was what exactly was he doing wrong? And that is what we are going to discuss. So KDP's darkest secret? Let's get right into it. So, the first thing you need to know is that the vast majority of books on Amazon are only selling one to two copies a year.
They do terribly, the number of sales is so ridiculously small. It's almost painful. I've even heard some people comment that Amazon doesn't even make money so much off of the publishing business.
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It's rather to pull people in to keep them on their website so they can take advantage of other sales that they make with a whole series of other products. But with regards to Amazon KDP, the first thing to remember is the vast majority of books are just not selling.
The question is what exactly is going on? But I don't want to cut ahead of myself into the secret yet. The second thing is the content of your book will not compensate for a failure to optimize the book.
When we talk about optimization, we're talking about your cover, your title, and your subtitle. All of these things play a very important role in getting your book specifically to start selling on Amazon.
So, if you're choosing the wrong site on that, you may be thinking the content itself will pull it through because you're such a wonderful writer. The painful aspect of this is that if your marketing is off, nobody's even going to read what you have written and how exactly can you win?
It'd be kind of like if you have cows on a farm that are producing a lot of milk and it is amazing. But then you put it into cartons that are all sort of misshapen and the labeling is sort of off.
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The question is, why do you imagine that the milk that you're selling is going to be shooting and flying off the shelves when your supply chain is unreliable and your marketing is terrible? And all of these other aspects of the sale of the milk are completely out of alignment?
I would tell you you're not going to make any sales on this milk. Then, often the person would say but my milk is so amazing. I'm telling you your books can be fantastic.
The contents, the stories you're writing, the how-to's, and the helping people with self-help can be unbelievably fantastic. But it still will not help you get the sales that you're going to need for your books as a result.
Because you are not paying attention to the marketing side of optimization. But that brings us to the specific secret answer of the day. It is that if there are no hungry readers in the market on Amazon KDP that you're looking to sell to, there are not going to be sales.
Looking For Hungry Readers
Now, what exactly do we mean by hungry readers? The answer is that these are people who are looking to buy a particular type of book. A book on a particular subject or theme or something along those lines.
I was dealing with Henry in his books in particular. We took a close look and we noticed we could not find any best sellers. We couldn't find any books that were ranked in the top hundred thousand for his specific book.
That was a very very bad sign when you're looking at getting a book onto the market. You do not want to find yourself in a situation where you can't find a single book that's selling within your specific market that you're trying to target on Amazon.
We want to find a series of books that are selling. But that's only part of the equation that reminds me of Philip, another one of my clients in the past. He was dealing with the same thing but in the other direction, he was doing coloring books.
We looked up coloring books on Amazon and we found 70,000 coloring books. Now, if you look at the sales, you would find lots of them that are doing well. But the downside of those books was the fact that his books were being lost among the 70,000 books on that market.
So these were also not hungry readers. They have so much to choose from. They could buy one of these, one of those. You're going to be marketed by a lot of these books. Maybe they're running more ads and then you have a bigger ad spend.
There are lots of things they can do to ensure they're going to beat you on the coloring book sale game. Because there are just so many of them, what we want to do is find the combination of these two. Where you see a lot of sales that are coming through but very few books on the market.
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That tells us we have some hungry readers. Meaning, if you put your book and it's optimized as we talked about in tip number two. We take that optimized book of yours and put it on Amazon.
What's going to happen is when they search those keywords we're using in the title and subtitle using KDSpy. Like I always tell you, that's the specific tool we use to identify the rank order of these books for the search term that you're looking for, for your specific book.
If we see that your books are going to end up showing up on page one of the search results on Amazon and if your book looks very similar to the absolute best sellers, then what's going to happen is you're going to start peeling off some of their sales.
Those sales are going to start coming towards your book as opposed to their book. And as a result, we're going to start building an audience. I hope you have an email list and all these other things.
But at a minimum, we want to see if we can start to increase the sales that we're making on your book by one optimizing the book. But make sure it’s in a market where hungry readers can be found.
I'm going to tell you if it was like either of these two other ones; one was there are 70,000 books, just too many books in that market or the other is I can't find a single book, like the book that I'm publishing. But it's wonderful because of the contents of the book.
The problem is that your contents alone are not going to give you the ability to overcome the fact that there are no readers for that type of book. Now, it could be that there are some exceptions to this rule.
Getting The Trust Of Your Audience
I want to say it even if there are no hungry readers, if you happen to be an influencer or somebody already sold a bunch of books, then the fact is it functionally makes you an influencer anyways. Then, you're going to be able to get sales on this book.
Because you're going to be driving traffic to that book. Without having to be dependent upon searching for people. Doing search results, searching for something, and then up comes your book. But when they see the book, they should know what kind of book it is and who the book is for.
Just by seeing the cover, the title, and the subtitle. That should make it super clear for your ideal reader to understand this book is for them. If there are no books on the market on this subject, that is a terrible sign.
It is a huge red flag. Do not write in this genre or subgenre, unless we're going for the starving artist and we've talked a lot about this on my channel. It's the idea that sometimes, some people say I don't even care if my book sells.
Well, I can tell you I've run across very few clients of mine who say such a thing. Then after the book comes out and doesn't make any sales, they’ll say oh well why am I not making sales? I want to get these sales going.
And I'm like, look, you have to sort of deciding if you want to be a starving artist that's fine. There's a secondary way of doing it; to become an influencer. As your name becomes associated with the subgenres that you're writing in, assuming we're choosing profitable ones.
You're going to be building up an email list and people who love to read your stuff, what are those people going to do? The answer is they're going to look at the latest books you come out with.
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So, as you start to build up your influence, you can then start coming out with books that are less profitable niches. But at the same time, as I said, there are very few books or no books on Amazon on the subject.
But you can still get sales because you're bringing your audience. That is a very important point because those people are going to know, like, and trust you. To know that this novel you've written or this self-help book you're writing are going to be meeting their needs.
Even if nobody on Amazon is currently doing that. This is actually how you can create a new market. Then you have the early mover impact where you're the first person inside of that market.
Now we're able to build up some steam. But if you do not already have an existing audience, where there are a lot of people and even by the way I've seen this before, you had some maybe famous people this last year who won, who put out a book and it just flopped when it got to Amazon.
Because their audience may like them on TikTok in the video format. They may trust what they say but their audience is not a bunch of readers who want to read this content. They just want to see it on TikTok.
So, it can become difficult to move them from one platform over to Amazon to start doing it. That's the reason why I always suggest for 100% of my clients make sure that it's a profitable market. That's something we always discuss; this is the absolute top discussion point in every free Discovery Session that I give to people.
So, I have a question for you. I want to know if your book ignores one or more of these issues that I was talking about. Because if it does, I need to know. Write “Yes” as a reply and write “No” as a reply to this email if it does not ignore one or more of these issues.