What s Working Now April 2016 Writing and Publishing Kindle Books in 2016
The Kindle Opportunity It s not just about royalties! Use Kindle to generate leads for your sales funnel, promote your white label brand, and promote yourself as an expert in your niche It is also about royalties! Great source of passive income, another source of income in your marketing business Little-known strategy we call Kindle Jacking profitably ride on the coat tails of a bestselling topic and/or author
Earning Potential Let s figure out how to get to $500/month that is about 8 sales a day for a $2.99 book Income potential is MUCH, MUCH higher (we ll show you how!)
Three Months to Success
Month One: Preparing For Success Research your topic and identify a proven niche Look for the following criteria for a niche: Adult Non-Fiction Best selling book sells for under $5 The top 3 best-selling books in that category have BSR s of under 150,000 The book has less than 150 pages The book was published over 6 months ago
Example
Further Research Google keyword searches, Google Trends Use our own Ebook Launchpad Look in bookstores, magazine racks to generate ideas Think of a problem a reader is trying to solve if you have a niche in mind, browse message boards, negative reviews for books in Amazon (so you know what you need to make right) Websites such as Kdspy.com, Yasiv.com, Keywordtooldominator.com
Should you use one? Pen Name? It s a good idea if you plan on publishing ebooks on a variety of niches use one pen name per niche. (Else, it would be strange if the same person wrote a book on soap making, and one on horse racing.) If you wish to brand yourself as an authority in a single niche, you can use your real name but even then, it is still fine to use a pen name!
Writing Your Book Create a series of topics that will become your table of contents for the book If possible, outsource the writing and the cover graphic Writing: Upwork or Freelancer.com Cover: Upwork or Fiverr (remember also a back cover for CreateSpace!) This will take a few weeks aim for around 17 20K words) Images can be bought from stock-photo websites such as 123RF.com or Pixabay.com
Outsourcing Tips You get what you pay for prepare at least $0.02 per word, or $300 - $400 for writing content for high quality writing Look for your writer on Elance, Textbroker or Freelance maybe Fiverr if you re likely (obviously a custom project!) Use a native writer U.S.-based, Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand If you find a great writer, keep them for future books! Same with your graphic designer. Budget between $50 - $75 Don t be afraid to budget $500 for this it will pay off in two months!
Month Two: Format Your Ebook Use our own Formatify Kindle Creator to format your book into Kindle (available in the Member s area under Ebook Launchpad) For around $45, you can outsource the formatting use somebody on Upwork or Fiverr Format for both Kindle and CreateSpace (a physical copy of your book) Calibre is another Kindle formatting option - http://calibre-ebook.com/
Publish on KDP First, create a Kindle account: http://www.kdp.amazon.com Then, go through the steps to publish your book!
Set Up Author Central Add your (real or pen name) bio and image - https://authorcentral.amazon.com/
Set Up on Create Space Have the option to publish physical books as well. Some of our titles sell MORE physical than Kindle books!
Month Three: Launch Once your book is published, launch it! Here s how to kick-start your sales: Ask friends and family to buy your book for sales momentum have them leave a review about a week later Run a countdown promotion once you have some reviews (must be enrolled in KDP Select) Set up free days for your book
Publicity Tips Hire someone at Fiverr to submit our book to about 200 review and social media sites, publicizing a free day Set up a website, Facebook page and email list to further publicize your book have your website in the book for readers to refer to Contact relevant bloggers to review (send them PDFs of your book) Create a revised copy a few months later and republish for an extra bump in sales (For that, you ll need an extra chapter or two to add)
Kindle Jacking Research a best-selling book by a celebrity author, and ride on their popularity by publishing a book that is complimentary to their own book Example: There is a new diet craze that people are searching for publish your own book, following the diet, but with extra recipes. Your book will show up in a reader s search Most authors won t mind, but make sure their title / method hasn t been trademarked - http://tess2.uspto.gov/ If it has, you can still get around this by altering your own title (ie The Paleo Diet is trademarked, so say 7 Days of Paleo Recipes )
Kindle Jacking Cont d Look in Yasiv.com for great ideas or similar brandable ideas to write books around After finding a product to write about, look at the main book s negative reviews perhaps you can fix the issues those people have (ie many fad diet books don t have many recipes) Make sure you add the disclaimer This book is not endorsed or affiliated with (author) If the author does complain, just change the title of your book
Kindle Jacking Case Study Research Phase: Looked for a best-selling diet book title, then checked Google Keyword Tool to see how many searches it got (over 55K per month) Checked competition some books listed for the celebrity keyword has less than 8 reviews. Perfect! No Trademark issues Bought the physical book and read it
Case Study Month Two Creation Phase: Researched a list of 40 main keywords, and keywords related to the diet Outsourced the book and cover design, guiding them with a Table of Contents (used UpWork) Used a writer who specializes in recipe writing (she bought all the ingredients, made the recipe and took pictures for the book) Made sure the cover looked very professional
Case Study Month Three Launch Phase: Formatted the book, submitted to KDP and CreateSpace for the hard copy Set up the book to be $0.99 and asked 5 friends to buy and review it Set up a free day and hired somebody at Fiverr to submit to 200 review and social media sites related to Kindle also submitted to bloggers for review Set up a basic Wordpress website and a Facebook page, and added diet and exercise content Set up an opt-in list on our website so subscribers can be alerted to future books if we decide to write a series
Case Study Results Total costs: $532.00 Results for first month after launch (January 2016): 4 reviews #3 for keyword we were targeting $454 in sales BSR between 70,000 and 25,000 Made close to $400 in February, so we are now running a profit Sold many physical copies through CreateSpace
Anatomy of a Bestseller One of our students ranked #21 for the ENTIRETY of Kindle! This was giving her a peak of 2,300+ sales for one day, and around 200 600 copies per day This is how she did it
Her Original Ebook She originally had a recipe book, but the BSR was in the 300,000 The ebook had 10 good reviews, and it was on a trendy topic The title was SEO optimized but not brandable (title was made up of keywords) About 70 Kindle pages Cover was simply a stock photo Uses a pen name
The Relaunch Created a new, brandable title (No keywords) Increased the page length to 100 pages Designed a much more professional cover by hiring a graphic designer Promoted to a website called Book Bub - https://www.bookbub.com (They have very strict standards, thus the increase in book length) Planned a 5-day KDP Select 99-cent promo Along with Book Bub, also used Fiverr to submit to hundreds of review and social media sites at the same time
The Results Reached #21 in ALL of Kindle! Best day was 2,635 PAID sales Even at $2.99 (after promotion ended), she still sold hundreds of copies per day Side benefit was appearing on bestselling page. You also have author rank, which entered Top 100 authors page on Amazon main page
Kindle Income Tips Decide what you want the book to accomplish lead generation, brand-building, or simply collect royalties and passive income Very important is to set up a mailing list to collect leads that way you have a built-in audience for your next book If aim is passive income, aim to publish one book per month Maximize reader engagement (high quality writing also, for Kindle Library, you get paid per page read) Aim for 17-20K words per book if you aim for passive income
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