There are a lot of platforms out there where you can put your books to. Find out if self publish Kindle make money or would you rather put your books to other places where you can earn much more than you can with Kindle.
Today's question has three answers and you're going to want to stick around for the third answer. It's a secret as to a major mistake in Kindle Publishing that is costing most authors and perhaps you a lot of money.
So let's get into it. Today's question that was sent in was self publish Kindle make money? Now, the person who asked this question is clearly wondering whether or not Kindle publishing would be right for them.
Can you actually make money with Kindle publishing? Maybe you've heard about it or maybe you've spoken with someone who said you can make tons of money. Then they give an example of an author or something.
But then what about the average author? What about if you've just got a short story or a poem and you want to put it out on Kindle, is that going to make money? That decision is a very important one.
Check out this related article: How To Self Publish Short Stories On Amazon?
There are some answers to this very question that are decisive about whether or not you will make money. But before we get into that, grab a copy of my free Self-Publishing Checklist where I reveal my secrets.
The tools I'm using and the steps I do to maximize the earnings I'm making off of self-publishing. This has worked for thousands of people. You shouldn't miss these exact steps.
So, self publish Kindle make money? Let me get a little bit into my story. When I first started self-publishing, I put out my very first Kindle book and I discovered I am going to sell nothing.
Does anybody want to read what I'm writing? All of these questions which later I would find out the answers to. I first just jumped into the water which I would suggest for all of you as well.
If you haven't gone about self-publishing your very first book, you're going to want to just get it out there. It doesn't matter the quality or any of these issues, just get it out there and we'll fix it over time.
You just need to follow the simple basic steps that are necessary to optimize your book over time. But if you do it all at once, you will become stressed out and that will create problems for you.
So, when I started and put my very first book out, I was seeing a sale here and a sale there. I was very happy, I was delighted to see the sales that were coming through. But then the question was, well I can't live off of $1 here or $2 there.
Keep in mind if your self-published book is selling for $3 which is what Amazon wants, $3 to $10 for the Kindle books that give you a 70% royalty rate. Then you are not going to be making really that much money.
If you're only getting $2 a sale, I mean how many sales does it take to get your money back? That's one of the reasons why you go about getting it formatted.
The covers and stuff can have a big impact on how quickly you can recoup the money that you've invested in your Kindle books. That is something that a lot of people just don't understand.
But over a series of years, I began to learn the secrets to self-publishing. Especially with Kindle that resulted in maximizing the number of sales I was making. I'm going to cover that a little bit in the answer.
So, self publish Kindle make money? Let me get into the answers for today. The first is according to The Guardian, the average author earns around a thousand dollars per year.
That means for all of the books that they have out there, they're only earning a thousand dollars which is absolutely terrible. Keep in mind we're not talking just their Kindle books because their Kindle books are probably less than half of that.
Find The Golden Ratio
Assuming they have paperbacks, so maybe only a couple hundred dollars for their Kindle books. I personally believe that these people are probably making like $100 a year or maybe $50 a year or something even less than that.
If you look at the money that they've invested into those Kindle books, what you will discover is that they're going negative because they invest. You're paying too much money for your cover and your formatting as well as your editing.
You could be spending thousands of dollars into your book whereas, I would suggest getting only a couple of hundred dollars. $300 to $600 into each book. Not $5000 to $10000 because it would take you decades to earn that money back.
So that's the first thing you're definitely going to want to consider with your Kindle books. But keep in mind a thousand dollars a year, if you spend $5000 to get each book out or something, then, of course, you're going to take a loss.
The next thing is you're going to want to optimize your books. And that's a little bit of what I was discussing before. We need to make sure we're publishing books in a hungry market.
That is to say, a market where people want to hear what you have to say and they are willing to invest the money that it takes to go about doing that. So that you're putting stuff out there and you see there are lots of sales on these books.
I used this tool called KDSpy to show you exactly how many sales. When you say, search for a keyword, let's say Puppy Training for example and we see how many books in the top 100 000. The basic sales rank for Kindle for that book keyword you see.
Then we look at that number. What we want to do is generally look at the top 20 books and then you would have how many of those in the top hundred thousand for that search term.
Then we can see how many Puppy Training books exist on the market. If we take the total number of books that exist on the market and divide it by the number of books in the top 100 000, it's going to give us a number.
I call it the golden ratio because anything under 30 is a fantastic book to put out. There's a hungry market, you have people buying books those in the top 100 000 basic sales rank.
That means they're selling at least one copy a day, maybe more and there are not that many books on the market. They'll be probably less than several hundred at most for that exact keyword. So, we're making sure that the market is hungry.
There are not many books and they are buying the ones that are in that market. The next thing is we're going to want a cover that's going to look just like the best-selling books in the market that we're competing. Our readers have already told us what they want to buy.
So the best-sellers of course are going to be where we start. How long are those books? How many reviews do those books have? These are the things we are going to want to get.
What type of descriptions are they using? We're going to come in very very close to what they're already doing. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel.
That is something that so many people make the mistake on and that is where they stuck with. They write 10 books and they are making $1000 a year. There is a reason for this lousy performance and that is because they simply are not optimizing their books for what their readers want.
They are writing a terrible description. They are using terrible keywords. And they are writing in a market that's not good.
They are paying too much for their covers. When you're ordering your cover, you simply take the best-sellers and ask the cover creator to make something that looks similar to that. With your title and your author name on that cover.
Maximizing Your Sales On Kindle
Here is the one I use on Fiverr. $20 will create an amazing cover for you. No problem and no questions asked it's going to be a fantastic cover for your book.
You're going to see the sales coming in. Just the cover alone will generate the sales if you're in a good market and you have a great cover. That thing alone gets them to read the title.
Hopefully, the title is also a little bit similar, using similar keywords that are used within the best-sellers. Then a similar description and our book should be about the same link that they're doing. But that's not as important.
You're going to break it down into chapters when they look through the book. This is the previous thing that when they are looking into the book to see what it looks like, that the table of contents tells them what to expect. And you're going to deliver on that value.
These are the key secrets involved. So, self publish Kindle make money? But the thing is and this is the secret answer for today, it is that Kindle is just the start. I make the vast majority of my money through paperbacks, hardback books, and audiobooks.
That combination makes maybe 75% of my sales but the Kindle books can lure people in. They see you have a Kindle book if you want to put your audiobook on ACX Audible. That's another thing a lot of people don't realize.
So, Kindle books are the first and the easiest place to get it. And also if you're selling the paperback for $20 and our Kindle books are at $2.99, they are going to see a slash through the price.
They'll say, look it's like 80% off or whatever it is. That might tempt them to get the Kindle book or they'll be tempted by the Kindle book first.
But then they'll be like, wait for a second, you've got an audiobook, a paperback, or a hardback version of this book, maybe I should go for those instead. People have their favorite formats they want.
So by having it in those different formats, maximizing our total distribution, your Kindle book can be used to generate traffic to sell those other books. That is what happens, I run ads against the Kindle books, I run ads against the paperback books.
Sometimes, they click on the Kindle book, they see I have a paper book and then they buy it. They'll see the markdown on the price or the slash through that high price for the paperback.
Then that will sometimes tempt them just to start coming onto the page and seeing what options are available. Then they will make the purchase and this my friends is how we not only make a thousand dollars a year but make a lot more than a thousand dollars a year.
Also by controlling the prices on our books, what we're going to be able to do is we're going to be able to ensure that we're maximizing the total number of sales that we're getting. And we're going to recoup the money quickly.
In 2 to 3 months, I want all the money back that I invested in the book. After that, we start developing our long tail of book after book after book, forming this nice stream of pearls. A tale that goes as long as possible for me.
I have over 185 books out there. Each one selling a little bit here and a little bit there each day. I don't know which platform it is going to sell on.
I don't know which of my readers is going to like it best. It's a tough call but the fact is that over time, these books are going to make the sales that are necessary to start building up and helping your business grow.
This is the key to really maximizing your sales on Kindle. Self publish Kindle make money? Why don't you tell me what you found below in the comments?
I respond to 100% of the comments and check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.