I Made These Mistakes So You Don't Have To - Publishing Low Content Books On Amazon KDP

I've made a few mistakes along the way in my publishing journey and in this video I'm going to share some of them with you so that hopefully you can avoid making the same mistakes as me welcome to my channel thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join me here today I've been publishing books on the Amazon KDP platform since 2020 and I'm still learning as I go things are constantly changing and I'm sure I'm going to make more mistakes as I continue Along on this journey but especially in the beginning when I was brand new to this business I definitely made some mistakes I personally don't think mistakes are always bad if you're making mistakes then you're learning and you're growing and improving and you're not going to get everything right all the time so don't be scared to fail and to make a few mistakes it's all part of any new Venture but if I can help any of you out there wanting to publish books to avoid making some of the mistakes that I made then hopefully I can save you some time maybe a little bit of money and get you to where you want to be quicker some of you watching who have already published books may have made some of these mistakes too so if you have please let me know down in the comments below because I know I'm not alone with some of these the first mistake I made when I started publishing was procrastinating and being distracted by other things commonly known as shiny object syndrome I actually came across self-publishing books a few years before I started publishing my own books in fact the first book that I did publish was back in 2018 and I published a coloring book and this was way before KDP was even around and I published this book on Amazon using the creat space platform I published the book I set the price really high so that no one would buy it until I received a copy of the book and I could look at it and make sure everything was okay and then once that was all done I was going to go back in and set the price to what the proper price should be once I had made sure that everything in the book looked okay I received the book it was great and then I don't know what happened but I never went back in and changed the price and I totally forgot all about publishing and all about create space I think all of us worry about spending too much time doing something for it not to work so I would procrastinate fiddling with the design or trying to think of the perfect title for the book or trying to come up with the perfect pen name and things like that for years I had been dabbling in online businesses and trying to find ways to make Mone money online that suited my goals and the skills that I had and I had really bad shiny object syndrome I was following lots of people online who did all different online businesses and were all making lots of money doing it and so I would start something and then see someone else doing something different making a ton of money from it and so I would move on to that thing then I would see someone else doing something different again and I'd go off and try that without really giving anything time to see if it actually worked it's a NeverEnding cycle self-publishing had always stuck with me though and so finally in 2020 I made the decision to stop jumping from one thing to the next and just focus on just self-publishing books through Amazon KDP now if you're in the same boat when you're trying lots of different projects or businesses all at once I highly recommend picking just one maybe two at the most and just of focusing on those things for a period of time it's amazing how productive you can become when you only have one thing to think about it doesn't mean that you can never ever start another business or another project just wait until you have one thing going and working really well or you've at least tried it long enough to find out if it's going to work well for you or not before you move on to the next thing now talking about following lots of people online leads me into the next mistake that I made and that was copying other people purely because they were being successful with something not because I actually wanted to do it and I mean this in terms of the kinds of books that I was publishing I'd see someone making thousands of dollars publishing thousands of blank notebooks so I started doing that then I saw someone else making heaps of money from log books so I started doing that but I find log books extremely boring and then i' see someone else making some other kind of book so I'd move on to doing those kind of books in instead of just doing my own research I was trying to cut corners and also instead of thinking about the kinds of books that I actually wanted to publish and that I enjoyed publishing I was just copying other people what works for one person isn't necessarily going to work for anybody else and definitely not to the same extent and you do have to kind of enjoy what it is that you're doing if you're going to be doing it day in and day out so if you're making boring books that you don't enjoy and it just really feels like a chore then it's going to be a lot harder to keep going with it and to stick with it especially during those tough times when your books aren't selling the next mistake that I made was thinking that I didn't need to do any marketing myself and thinking that every single book that I published was going to be an instant bestseller sorry to burst your bubble but for 99% of us we are not going to have instant bestselling books without doing any work whatsoever I had this idea that my books were just going to be better than every single other book out there on Amazon and people were just going to miraculously find it and love it and everyone would just start buying it and all I had to do is publish the book do not go into this with that kind of mindset otherwise you are going to be disappointed you do need to Market your book and you need to do work to get sales even if you do publish a book that is way better than all the other books available on Amazon customers still need to find it in amongst those millions and millions of books and if they can't find it they can't buy it and so you need to help customers find your book so they can buy it which leads me into my next mistake which was not using Amazon as earlier in my publishing Journey when I first started publishing I had the mindset that I wanted to do everything as cheap as I possibly could free would be even better and that I was going to do every everything myself and that I would rather spend the time waiting for sales to come and using free methods of promoting my books and that paying for ads was completely unnecessary and a complete waste of money now I'm not saying that you can't and will not make any sales if you do not run ads of course you can social media is great and a free way to create sales for your book but it is timec consuming and it's lots of effort and it is more a long game type of strategy where I wouldn't expect to see results immediate you would be expecting results in quite a long time but as time went on I started to see the value in investing in my business and as well as seeing the value of my time and that a lot of times it's actually more profitable to start running ads because you can see a return turn much quicker than just utilizing those free marketing methods I understand that not everyone has a budget for ads I get that but really if you are serious about making a living from publishing creating an actual long- lasting sustainable business from publishing you should be willing to invest something in setting up your business and get it running it doesn't have to be a lot you can even start with just a few dollars a day in running ads and build it up from there now I would just like to take a moment before moving on to the next mistake to thank the sponsor of this video skillshare skillshare is the largest online learning community for creatives with thousands of classes and members I myself have been a member of skillshare for a couple of years now and I can always count on it to find something new and exciting to learn that I can apply to my business or to my life and if you're interested in expanding your own skills you can do that with skillshare whether it be with something career focused like graphic design illustration Entre r preneurship or creative writing or even learning a new hobby like painting I've been wanting to improve on my video editing skills for a while now and so I've just taken this Adobe Premiere Pro for beginners class with Charles Carter so that I can take my YouTube videos to the next level if you're interested in trying out skillshare for yourself the first 500 people to use my link will get access to one of skillshare's best offers 30 days free and 40% off your first year of skillshare membership this Tri gives you access to the complete library of classes so you can go and learn something right now today okay on to the next mistake there does seem to be a lot of them doesn't there another mistake that I made was just thinking that I could do it all and this sort of runs alongside with not being willing to invest in my business in the beginning at the start when you aren't making much money or making any money at all it's hard to think about parting with the little money that you do have and while I technically could do everything myself when it comes to designing creating publishing and marketing a book I'm not great at every single little thing that is involved but I guess for a while I thought I was it can feel quite harsh to admit to yourself that you aren't that good at something or that your books aren't living up to the standards of the other books available on Amazon but it really is the best thing that you can do take a really good look at what it is within your business that you are actually really good at do you have amazing design skills and you can create the best book covers or are you a wizard research and being able to find really profitable niches or can you build an Instagram account to a huge engaged following whatever it is focus more on that and let go of all the other things Outsource whatever you can so that your time is freed up to focus on those things that you are really good at and the things that are really going to help your books sell and your business grow when I did this it just makes your job so much more enjoyable and the the books that you produce end up being so much better than what you can do by doing everything alone these were some of the biggest mistakes that I've made over the years and I've really learned a lot since publishing my first book way back in 2018 and I'm still learning today I actually received a comment on one of my videos recently which said if someone was starting publishing on KDP now in 20123 would I still recommend it and my response was yes definitely I would it's also another mistake not to do something because it seems oversaturated or because other people tell you it's not a good idea or that they didn't make money with it or by doing that business so you shouldn't do it either in terms of books they are not going anywhere anytime soon so if publishing books is something that you have been wanting to do then stop procrastinating stop asking other people if you should do it stop researching whether you should do it stop procrastinating stop worrying that you're going to make a mistake and just start doing it you are going to make mistakes along the way but hopefully after watching this video you'll make less mistakes than I did thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Self Publishing Central

Views: 6,622

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: L88uzB3-mc0

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2023