7 Tips BEFORE Starting Amazon KDP - My Thoughts After $1.5 Million

so I started doing Amazon KDP when I was completely broke and over the past couple years I was able to generate over $1.5 million in royalties and become a self-made millionaire at age 26 from actually self-publishing not from teaching others how to do so like selling courses now there's a lot of things that I've learned along the way that will help you in your own KDP Journey if you're getting started today so I'm going to give you seven tips that help me go from literally zero to building a thriving KDP business and completely changing my life and if you implement these you'll have a much better chance of succeeding so with that being said let's go right into tip number one which is to understand that there has never been a better time than now to start you see a lot of people like to complain that it is too late to start Amazon KDP and all the success stories that you hear are from people who started couple years ago and to be honest this is 100% coping and just making excuses so that they don't have to actually go and give this a shot and they have an excuse for not trying don't listen to these people because to prove that this is wrong after selling my first KDP business I went on and started a new one just last year and I went from 0 to 20K a month once again so I did it twice not just once I did it twice and I documented the entire process which you can see in the KDP income report playlist on my channel so there's still huge opportunity on Amazon KDP but let's be real the more you wait on getting started the more you procrastinate the more saturated it'll get the best time to start was yesterday and the next best time to start is today and the great thing is with the rise of AI it has never been easier and cheaper to get started with Amazon KDP which takes me to tip number two Embrace AI technology because thanks to the rise in AI the stuff that we had to do before that took a lot of time or a lot of money can now be done in minutes literally for free when I started back in the days we had to spend days or even weeks creating an outline for the book and if we didn't want to spend the time doing that we had to Outsource to someone who can do that for $100 or if not more writing book descriptions same thing it usually takes hours to days or you could Outsource to someone who will do it for $50 to $100 getting illustrators to create high quality book covers or designs inside the book took a long time as well you had to go and find someone who can do that negotiate a rate and then you had to wait a month or you know weeks if not to get them to make the designs and you had to pay a premium for it but now thanks to AI every single thing that I just mentioned can be generated with either Chad GPT mid Journey or any other AI tool that you use literally in minutes with one click Amazon is even beta testing AI audiobook narration so before we had to pay hundreds of dollars to a narrator to narrate our books into an audiobook but now it's going to be free for you once Amazon rolls this out and there are a lot more tools that makes this business easier faster and simpler so don't be afraid of AI because AI is here to stay and instead embrace it learn how to use it because it's just going to make your life a lot more easier and if you're afraid of AI technology and you're overwhelmed by it you know perhaps you don't think your Tech Savvy don't worry it's just like anything that you learn in life you just have to take it one step at a time and once you get it it's actually quite easy so take it step by step and I'm confident that you can learn it even if you think you're not very good at technology all right so tip number three is to make sure to check for demand before publishing so when people first learn about Amazon KDP they almost always get these ideas of oh my God I can publish a book on this topic and publish a book on this topic and they get a bunch of ideas but the problem is they never go and validate if that topic is actually profitable on Amazon so they go and waste a ton of time and a ton of money making a book on it just to publish it and ended up not making any sales at all because they once again didn't validate if people were actually looking for a book on the topic then they get defeated and then they quit I've seen this multiple times like LZ here one of our students in our program he was just making $100 a month because he was publishing a bunch of books and topics that he didn't actually validate but once he joined our program and he started doing proper keyword research he went from making $100 a month to $5,000 a month as you can see here to hitting $10,000 in a month just 2 months later to now consistently hitting $2,000 a day and quitting his job and now starting to travel the world with his KDP income I just met him in Thailand uh this is him on the right so that is pretty cool so this is extremely important please don't ignore this and if you're wondering so how do you actually validate a topic well it's actually very simple you just ask yourself are there other books on this topic that is actually selling because that's all the proof that you need that if you publish a book on the same topic it's probably going to sell too so just to show you live how it works you type in your book topic so in my case if I'm looking to publish a book on decluttering then I'll type that in in the search bar and I'll see all these books on decluttering and you can see the BSR right here so you can use whatever tool you want I have this paid tool called book beam which actually tells me how much it's making but you can use free tools like DS Amazon quick view uh that'll tell you the BSR right here okay the best sellers rank so if this number right here is below $ 80,000 then that means the book is at least making $500 a month if not more uh on average okay don't quote me on it but it's around there so if you find a bunch of book on a topic that's below 80,000 that is good enough sign that yes decluttering is profitable so in this case this book is way below 80,000 this book is a little above 80,000 but this one right here once again is way below 880,000 so if you start finding a bunch of books uh like this on the topic then that's a good sign so that is how you validate your topic if you don't see any other books selling then most likely because no one's looking for that book so scrap that idea so that was tip number three and now that you found a profitable topic tip number four is to focus on one Niche and a brand another big mistake people make is they essentially do this thing called the shotgun method where they never really focus on one Niche or one brand and they just publish a bunch of books and a bunch of different niches and they just see what sticks and as someone who's been in this space for literally years now now and who personally know hundreds of successful KDP Publishers and I can tell you with confidence that every single successful Publishers that I know only focuses on one if not two niches they don't go running around like a chicken with his head cut off with absolutely no focus on what they're doing so what I mean by this is you don't want to go ahead and you know publish One log book and then one coloring book and then go and try out one book a non-fiction and then try out fiction and you're just all over the place pick a niche right if you're going to do coloring books publish a bunch of books and coloring book build a brand there right Master one type of book before you move on to the next one it'll take multiple books for you to actually learn what works what doesn't and actually get good at producing those kind of books and over time you'll become an expert in that Niche and you will build a brand which is where the real money is at this is what Josh did to go from a complete beginner in KDP when he joined my program to making over $66,000 in a single month to now making over $58,000 if you combine this 44 $33,000 KDP income and $115,000 from Audible and he's this guy on the left also traveling the world right now and by the way I'm not showing you these guys results to sell my program okay I'm just showing you real life examples to prove a point here and these results that you see it's definitely not typical okay but it's possible so tip number five is be okay with investing into your business so recently I did a poll on my YouTube channel asking subscribers how much money they want to make from their Amazon KDP business and this is a response I God literally over half of the people said they want to make over six figures a year 16% said they want to make seven figures a year and 9% said they want F you money I'm assuming millions and millions of dollars and yet when I tell them that you have to invest $50 into a tool so you can do keyword research easier and faster and better or you have to invest $100 in a book cover just so you can have a professional book covers everybody freaks out saying it's too expensive so guys you have to understand that you cannot get something without giving something you have to make the investment whether it's with time if you don't have the money or with money if you don't have the time but you have to invest something yes if money is tight then you can do more of the work yourself which is completely fine that'll help you save some money but certain things are better outsourced to a professional such as creating book covers because your book cover is the single biggest factor in determining whether a book will succeed or not so you definitely don't want to cheap out here trying to save some money creating book covers yourself on canva when you're not a designer so you don't want to do that but the good news is outsourcing book covers to a professional is a lot cheaper than you think so Fiverr is an excellent place to hire professional book cover designers for a very affordable price and just to show you some of the gigs that I personally work with let's say you do low content books kids activity books this is a great gig uh that'll create a book cover for just $20 and you can see the type of book cover is really really good if you're doing something like non-fiction or fiction higher content books then this gig German creative is also someone that I've worked with extensively for over the years uh so I recommend you order from the premium option just because I found that the quality of that is a lot higher than if you just go for the basic package but you can get a eBook and a paperback cover done for a very affordable price of just $30 so you can definitely build this business for free if you want to but me personally i' rather pay a little bit of money to get a much higher quality product than if I would do a book cover design as an example myself and also to save a crap ton of time time all right so tip number six is to focus on producing and not consuming so when I first started I spent months consuming every single information online on Amazon KDP I watched all the YouTube videos I read all the blog posts I was engaging in all the Facebook groups which is great but the problem is I wasn't taking any action you have to understand that we get paid to produce content not to consume you don't get paid to learn okay you get paid to produce so I totally understand that feeling that you want to learn and know everything and plan out everything before you actually take the first step and start this business but the harsh truth is no matter how much you learn you will never feel like you know 100% of everything so if you're waiting until you feel like you know enough to take action I can almost guarantee that you will never take action because you're never going to get there the successful ones always take action despite not knowing everything and they learn as they go so your first book will probably suck and it's probably going to fail and that is okay because that's the beauty of Amazon KDP that you're not going to get in any other business even if a book is crap and you do a really bad job it's going to stay on Amazon as digital real estate it's going to keep on selling until Amazon shuts down which is probably going to be never so it's going to keep selling for basically your entire life and you have your entire life to recoup your investment and that's the crazy thing about Amazon is there's so many customers searching for things to buy on Amazon that even a crappy book will will still sell here and there and over time you usually make your money back in stocks in real estate it's pretty typical and it's considered a good investment if you break even so you make your money back in 10 years but in KDP even a bad book took me Max one year to make my money back and that is considered very very long usually it's a lot shorter and even if it takes a year or two years right you make your money back and after that it's all profit I mean after that for decades whatever the book makes is pure profit and and you're not really doing anything cuz you did the work upfront I've published hundreds of books and I literally never had a single one not make my money back obviously I cannot guarantee anything right that is just my experience but that is my experience with Amazon KDP so just start go from a consumer to a producer because that is how you make money and the last tip tip number seven is invest in your knowledge and learning high value skills so when I first started the best thing that I've done is to invest in a course and a mentor could I have succeeded without it probably but you know I can almost guarantee that I would have made way more mistakes lost a lot more money and I would probably take way longer to succeed yes nowadays A lot of the information is free online like these videos that I make myself which I believe I share a lot more than others on what it truly takes to succeed on Amazon KDP but I still believe that it's not going to replace a centralized Hub of information where you can follow step by step and more than just information the fact that you can go and engage in the community and ask questions and you have a coach that will walk you through the process that's the most valuable thing that you'll get in a program that is laid out step by step like Martino here who was making $200 a month on KDP before uh joining my program and now he's consistently hitting over $10,000 per month and scaling fast and obviously it's not the course that did it it's because he took action right the course is not going to make you money you know it's going to teach you how to do it but you still got to go and take action so it's because he worked super hard but I believe a course would shortcut the process so if you want to check out my program the link is in the description but once again guys you don't have to join my program like it doesn't have to be mine right you can join someone else's KDP course if you don't like me or you know for whatever reason and that's fine but I'm just saying that I do still believe that having one course one program uh or you know working with a coach where you can follow a proven formula step by step is way better than trying to you know connect pieces from one YouTube video with another blog post and just trying to get information from so many different places you're going to succeed a lot faster and you're going to avoid so many mistakes as well as I do think having a little bit of skin in the game will help motivate you to take a lot more action than if you're trying to do everything for free uh because when I first got started I invested in the program I spent some money into joining that so that definitely lit a fire on me to go and take action and actually make it work because I actually spent some money so those were the seven biggest tip that I believe if you're getting started with Amazon KDP now uh would help you out and if you enjoy this video then leave a like you know let me know in the comments what are you struggling with because I read all the comments actually and you know that actually gives me a lot of ideas on what kind of videos to make so let me know subscribe if you haven't yet and that is it thank you so much for watching I'll see you guys in the next one [Music]

Channel: Sean Dollwet

Views: 28,292

Keywords: self publishing, amazon kdp, how to make money online, amazon kindle publishing, amazon kdp publishing, paul marles, low content book publishing, low content books, low content books kdp, low content kdp, low content publishing, no content book publishing, no content books, kdp income report, kdp revenue, amazon income streams, dane mcbeth, mikkelsen twins, kdp niche research, kdp low content, KDP tips, Publishing Life, Audiobook Publishing, write a book with chatgpt

Id: C46OfO3A6e4

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2024