How I AUTOMATE 99% of My Amazon KDP Business (The Secret)

in this video I'll show you exactly how I automate and Outsource 99 of my Amazon KDP business [Music] what's going on guys welcome back to another video so if you're new to the channel my name is Sean and I've built a seven figure KDP publishing business which I eventually sold and now I'm building my second KDP account so if you want no BS publishing advice from someone who is actually doing it then make sure to subscribe and if you want a completely free training on how I built my KDP business to this level then there is a free training in the description below alright so this is going to be a very detailed video it's going to be probably a longer video on exactly what task in my publishing business do I do myself and what tasks do I Outsource and if I do Outsource how do I exactly do that I'll show you exactly the services or the platform I use to hire other people I'll show you how I set up the systems so that you know exactly what to do to build your own team so that you can scale your publishing business faster now if you want to scale your KDP business to over 10K a month or more then hiring a team becomes extremely important you can definitely do it yourself but if you can learn how to out source and build a team then you can do it way faster because you have to understand this quote which is you're either paying with time or money but you're paying either way you can try to save money by you know doing all the tasks yourself but understand that there's this thing called the opportunity cost which means that you know Outsourcing can cost a little more money for you but it opens up a lot of time for you to pursue other opportunities and other ways to make more money so with that being said let's get right into it and once again all the services that I recommend in this video I'll leave a link in the description so you guys can also go and check it out alright so starting with keyword research this is something that I still do myself I think this is very very important to still you know do it because this is one of those things that is very very hard to Outsource and also it's literally the most important step in terms of the publishing process so this is one of the very few tasks that I do myself next is title creation so it's the same thing this is the literally the the two tasks in the entire publishing business that I do myself you can Outsource the title creation you can definitely hire somebody else to do it you can hire them in upwork there are Fiverr gigs that can do this for you but for me personally I kind of enjoy the process I do it uh recently there's a new tool obviously we all know this chat GPT is blowing up and chat GPT has been pretty good to save you some time and in terms of coming up with title ideas so I just wanted to add that tool here as I'm moving on to the book outline research and this also means book topic research and essentially content ideas uh in terms of coming up with what to include in the book and also you know customer research too like exactly what is the customer looking for when they're buying these books so that kind of research I have somebody else do it for me I hired this person on upwork and I actually paid 35 dollars per uh 30 000 word non-fiction book you can probably hire people between Thirty to fifty dollars just post a job on upwork looking for a outline research you know topic research kind of gig and then you can find somebody there all right next is Ghost writing so for new niches that I'm you know entering for the first time that is not proven I don't know if it's gonna work what I do is I usually use ghost writing com so the go-to ghost riding company the one that I like to use is either the urban writers or the writing Summit either way they're both very very good once I decide to build a niche style so once I know that the niche is good and I decided to build a brand then what I do instead of using ghost riding companies is I go and hire a dedicated writer on upwork so that I can work with the same person every single time the urban Riders is great but you know it's harder to work with the same person frequently you can request the writer but they're not always available and that's exactly why eventually you know to have the same tone have the same writing voice when it comes to you know the book content you want to work with the same writer to build out the brand and that's why I start with the urban writers but I switch to upwork eventually so this is how Urban writer looks uh there is a coupon code that you guys can use in the description that'll give you a little bit of discount this is a pricing for their writing packages typically I use either the top or the premium package I think top is a pretty good place to be at uh or even Urban package has proven to be pretty good from my experience so this is a price for them but when I do hire people on upwork obviously I am skipping the middleman which is you know the ghost riding company so I try to hire a little cheaper than the normal rate that you see here so typically you can hire people between two dollars to three dollars per 100 words so you'll save a little bit of money there all right next is illustrations which applies more for like low and medium content books if you're doing that you can Source this from canva or creative Fabrica both are a good place to be at but a lot of times I have my own uh illustrator that can create custom illustrations which I hire on upwork so depending on the complexity of the illustrations you can literally pay someone you know two three dollars if it's like a simple image that you need I pay around five dollars for an example a children's you know storybook kind of illustration that'll be like five bucks for me uh but if you're getting like a very complex adult calling book illustration that'll be like tens of dollars per image so it really depends but I hire this person on upwork kind of similar to the concept of you know working with the same writer I want the same design style and that's why I like to have a go-to illustrator that I can work with next is the editing and proofreading of the book so I train my Editor to do the outline so the person who did my outlines will also be the one editing the book and the reason why I do this is because when you create the outline right when you do the outline research you're essentially researching about the topic right and so when you go ahead and you know proofread the book after the writer writes a book you know exactly if the writer followed the outline or not because the editor is the one that actually uh created the outline right so when they're going ahead and checking the book they know if the writer followed or not and on top of that when they do the outline research they become more experienced and you know knowledgeable in the topic so that that'll affect their performance when it comes to proofreading and editing the book because they know exactly what to fix what to include those kind of things so I have the same person do both of those I think it synergizes very very well and uh how much I pay well I think a hundred dollars per 30 000 word is a good place to be at so you can pay around this amount and you can hire someone like this on upwork as well so next is cover design so for low and medium content books I actually use Fiverr for my cover designs so I pay between five dollars to thirty dollars for a cover design because the whole purpose of low and medium content book is you know we're trying to create a book at a lower cost right and so I want to keep my overall Investments on the low end so that's what I do but for my main brand with my non-fiction you know high content book then I want to make sure I do everything I can to make the book top quality so I use 99 designs which I found a go-to designer on 99designs because you can work with them one-on-one and I pay that person a hundred and ten dollars for the design submit it in Kindle paperback and A6 cover so for Fiverr there's a couple gigs that you can use for high content or medium content books if you're doing like a high content book but you want to get the covers on Fiverr then I would use someone like this gig I'll leave a link to these gigs if you guys want to check it out but it's super cheap it's ten dollars and you know very high quality cover so this is how you can save pretty good amount of money this gig right here is someone I use for low and medium content so it's 35 dollars and you can get both a cover and actually an interior as well so it is really good in my opinion and they create super high quality book covers so it's way better than what I would actually create myself like this is a crazy cover design considering that you're only paying 35 dollars and you're also getting an interior like that's a really really good value and finally I use 99 designs for my brand once again all right so for book formatting I have a personal VA where I pay 20 per book to format for the ebook and a paperback version but book formatting is actually very very easy to Outsource and it's very cheap too so this gig right here uh you can see that you know great reviews and everything but they will do basic formatting for your book up to 100 Pages for just 20 so a lot of times you know you can do formatting yourself with Microsoft Word that's pretty easy but a lot of times you can just Outsource for very cheaply so that's what I would recommend all right next is cover conversions so this is once you have your cover and you want to make it into a hard cover or you want to turn that cover into the ACX cover if you didn't get that yet then what you can do is also go to Fiverr and do this very easily these are some really cool gigs that you can use to convert your Kindle cover into a 2400 by 2400 pixels ACX cover and they will literally do this with a JPEG file you don't even need like a source file for just five dollars on Fiverr so this is a gig that I use actually to convert my covers if I need one and if my designer didn't give me the A6 cover and this is if I want to convert my paperback uh cover into hard cover version because hardcover and paperback the dimensions a little different so there's a very easy way to convert that and that is with this gig so it's just five dollars once again and they will convert that into hardcover so a lot of people sleep on hardcover books and I don't understand why because it takes literally just five dollars to convert the cover and then you upload it on KDP and let's say you make one sale right and let's say your average royalty is like five bucks per sale that means all you need is one extra sale in the lifetime of that book to make Roi on how much you invested to create that hardcover and I'm pretty sure I know that hardcover sells a lot less than paperback but I am pretty sure that you'll make at least one sale doing so and so it just you know is a no-brainer for me to convert all my books into hardcover and just upload it there all right next is uploading my books to various platforms but mainly KDP ACX ingramspark and different platforms so I actually have my personal VA access my KDP account and upload the books I've confirmed with KDP that this is allowed so I asked KDP is it allowed to have my assistant log into my KDP account from a different IP address right and help me with uploading the book and the support set that's completely fine just you know the only thing is like you just want to keep in mind that you know you're trusting that person right because they also have access to like all the information so you know if you trust a person that's fine in terms of like IP address no issues at all so yeah that's what I do is I pay my VA five dollars per upload alright getting reviews so the number one way to get reviews is if you have a built-in audience so that is why I am building my email list which I'll show you how I do that later on but I have about 4 000 subscribers now I get 40 plus reviews per book from there and a lot of people will say that I do want a free copy so I give them the free copy and then two weeks later once my book is published I follow up with them saying hey my book is published you know could you please leave a review if you like the book right and so because of my email list I get you know 30 40 reviews uh right after I launched a book but on top of that if I need additional reviews then I use a site called Puppy And also the third option to getting reviews is just organically so selling your book leads to getting organic reviews over time so this is puppy if you haven't heard how it works then just look at the website the link is in the description and you'll kind of learn how it works but this is a very very easy way and a very cost effective way because you do have to pay a little bit but it's like 20 bucks a month and you can get five to ten reviews every week as the site says and the process is very easy so once again check out the website if you want to learn how it works there is a little discount if you use the link in the description as well if you want to test it out alright so now we're going into more email marketing and a little more of a complex task so now we're talking about you know sending emails to my email list to ask for reviews just to nurture them and also for book launches so we have to come up and write you know multiple emails to ask for reviews right and also for the follow-up campaigns and also for book launches we sent about three emails you know telling people that our book is at 99 then go and buy it right so who writes those emails well I actually do not do this myself and I try to automate this task as much as possible to keep it simple for me and also my VA so what I do is I write the emails to add to my automated follow-up campaign so this is the nurturing emails and I do this once and those are something that you do it once and you're done because you write it once you set it in your follow-up campaign it goes out automatically and so you don't have to do anything else for the other emails which is for you know know asking for reviews right the pre-launch arc review request and also for the book launch emails what I do is I write a template email that is generic enough so that you know all you have to do for every single book launch is to just update the title of the book and the link to the book so I have that you know email template saved in draft so all my VA do is to go in update the title update the link and then send that over so essentially the email list is getting like a very similar email every single book launch but nobody complains because nobody really remembers that it's the same email right so that's completely fine and it works very well for me and it's automated now alright so if you're wondering how I automate the follow-up process so after you send them a free copy of the book how do I automate the follow-up process right asking for reviews once the book is Live Well what I do is I simply send people to book Sprouts so I upload my book book and create a review campaign on book Sprout so this is a website that you know makes the arc campaign and also follow-up super easy it's pretty much hands off so what I do is I send an email to my list and tell them hey my new book is live or I'm sorry my new book is available uh to read for free if you want to in exchange for review all you have to do is sign up to this link which is the book Sprout link and then they can download the file from there and once they do so two weeks later book Sprout will follow up with them automatically when the book is live and they can go and review it on Amazon without me doing anything so that is the best way for me in terms of the setup and you can see that this book this is the recent campaign you know February 21st or just a couple days ago it ended but I had 77 people claim the book and so far I got 28 reviews and there's a lot more coming up because book Sprout will automatically you know keep on following up with them so there will be a lot more people reviewing and that is how I get 30 40 reviews every single time I launch a book all right next is running Amazon ads so this is something that I Outsource as well so Amazon is something that I recommend you learn how to do in the beginning yourself and eventually though once your business is growing once you're publishing more books it becomes a full-time job just to manage Amazon ads so it is something that you want to Outsource to somebody else eventually so the first step do it yourself second step is to hire somebody on perhaps upwork or even Fiverr gigs I'm sure you can find it and you know have them replace you as the person that's running Amazon as but once your business grows even more you can hire a kind of a more of a premium service but you know that is an expert in running Amazon as there is a service called azroid that I talked about a couple times but they are pretty much a KDP specific you know Amazon PPC agency so they can go and run ads for you this is how azeroid look so if you want to test it out then what you have to do is to submit a request to talk to them and if they think you're a good match to work with them then you can go and do that all right next is finding additional categories so when you're uploading your book you can choose two categories to have your book in but you can actually have your book in way more than two categories you can actually have your book in 10 Kindle and 10 paperback categories well how do you find these additional categories and how do you add them well you can use tools like publisher rocket to easily find additional categories and then basically you send a list over to KDP to ask them to add your book in those so let me show you how I do that okay so we are in Publisher rocket right now so all you have to do is go to category search and from here you can sort you know by books Kindle so let's do books right here and let's say our book is in uh puzzles so it's a puzzle books right so you can enter keywords like that and then all the relevant categories will show up you can sort by how competitive it is you know sales number one so you all you need is two sales to become number one in this category right then you can get the best seller badge so that is how it works and that is why adding additional categories is very powerful but you can have your VA do this very easily so you don't just have them find eight additional categories and then email KDP alright so those were like the main task when it comes to publishing but there are some other smaller things that I still want to share to kind of help you with automating you know and systematizing the business flow so one is password sharing so if you start working with other people inevitably you will have to share passwords such as sharing your KDP account password right like I said I share my KDP account password but I don't want to actually share them the actual password and the email addresses so what I do instead is use a password sharing service like LastPass so LastPass is a free tool that you can sign up for it also acts as a chrome plug-in right here but basically if you want to share password all you can do is you know enter the email address you want to share it to without actually sharing the password so it is a very very useful tool alright so next will be project management so if you start scaling and if you start publishing multiple books at a time if you don't have some kind of project management or tracking you know system set up it becomes pretty confusing in terms of tracking the progress for each of these books right so that's where Asana comes in and this is also free to sign up all right this is one of the biggest tip that I can give you in terms of automating and creating a system and that is trying to remove yourself as a middleman as fast as you can so you don't want to be in the middle of all Communications between your team so what I mean by this is let's say you're working with the writer The Ghost Writer and the editor right and you're in the middle so basically the writer turns in the book you get the file so you know he send it to you you got to get the file and then you send it over to the editor and the editor has some revisions that they want to make so they send it back to you with the comments so you receive the file and then you give it back to the writer the writer gives you version two of the book and then you have to download the file and then upload load it you know give it to the editor and it's just this constant back and forth that you're in the middle of right so you can remove yourself out of that and have the writer and the editor communicate with each other directly so you don't have to be involved in it so the secret to doing this is upwork group chats okay this is a secret this is like the biggest secret that I want you guys to take out of this and it's it's huge it's uh it's very very useful so basically what you can do is you can create a group chat right on upwork and this obviously only works if you're hiring all your Freelancers on upwork but once you do so you can invite your writer or your editor or you know your cover designer or whoever you're hiring right even your illustrator and they can communicate with each other so once the writer is done and you can see this you know example conversation here my editor is following up herself without me even asking to do so so the editor is following up to the writer the writer is you know giving them updates or giving us updates right and then once the writer is done they share the Google Doc editor reads it and then give them revisions and they go back and forth and I don't even do anything so this saves me a lot of time and you can apply this with any kind of position so if you have a low content book and you're working with illustrators as well then you can just add your illustrator here so once the writer is done with the project then the illustrator can come in and add the illustrations right and your book formatter can come in and format the book and everything is streamlined without you being involved in any part of it alright guys this is the last one uh this is for bookkeeping and tax stuff and I'll just simply tell you that my CPA does it so I I pay him a hundred dollars a month per company to do all the bookkeeping and and also the annual filing is a separate fee but I just try to do bookkeeping myself with QuickBooks and then it was just way too much hassle way too much time it was confusing as hell and I just didn't want to do it you know I'd rather just Outsource this to somebody else so that I have more time to go and actually you know build my business rather than spending all my time doing bookkeeping and accounting right so this is something I recommend you guys do as well a final way to Outsource it cheaply and just go and focus on making more money so this is basically how I Outsource you know almost all the tasks in the publishing business except for keyword research and title creation and obviously you know even though I Outsource I am still overseeing each task to make sure that it's high quality and make sure that it's good make sure that no one's messing up right so it's not completely hands off and no business in the world will ever truly be 100 passive so publishing is a great semi-passive business it's never going to be 100 passive people who sell you the 100 passive income dream is basically lying but you can get pretty close to it if you build systems you can definitely build your publishing business you know working maybe 30 minutes a day or even less just a couple hours a week A lot of people do it and they're pulling in six and seven figures a year so hope this video shows you that you know if you want to build true freedom and if you want to build a business you want to act like a CEO so CEO is someone that hires other people who's good at their jobs right who's a professional in whatever like formatting or cover design writing who hire other people and then you're the one overseeing it but you're not actually doing the task yourself so that is how you scale your publishing business hopefully you enjoy this video once again links to all the resources mentioned in this video is in the description below as well as a free training on how I built a seven figure publishing business also in the description so if you enjoyed this video leave a like subscribe if you haven't yet thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: Sean Dollwet

Views: 30,402

Keywords: self publishing, amazon kdp, how to make money online, amazon kindle 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, chatgpt for book writing, kindle direct publishing

Id: 1dZw7oPPDqQ

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023