This Is What You Need To Know Before Self-Publishing Your Book On Amazon KDP - Low Content Books

in this video I'm going to share 12 things that you need to know before using Amazon KDP to self-publish your books so make sure you watch till the very end before you hit publish to make sure KDP and self-publishing is right for you hi I'm Caroline welcome to my channel every single week I share videos all about self-publishing books and you're watching one of them right now so thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join me here it's no sec secret I am a big fan of self-publishing books using Amazon KDP that's what this whole channel is all about and I think KDP is a really great platform for anyone from Total beginners to people who are already experienced in creating and Publishing books but there are some things that would be good for you to know before you take the leap and Venture into self-publishing books and using Amazon KDP to do it and and unfortunately not all of them are great there are pros and cons to using KDP as there is with anything in life so I want to go through some of the things that I think are really important and useful to know before going down the path of self-publishing your own books and so that is what we are going to go through today so grab a drink get comfy and let's get started firstly just a very quick explanation for if you are unfamiliar with Amazon KDP and what it is Amazon KDP stands for Amazon Kindle Direct publishing and this is the arm of Amazon that provides a print on demand publishing platform where anybody can self-publish their own books and sell them in the Amazon Marketplace but what else do you need to know about Amazon KDP number one and we're going to be starting off with a not great one depending on your perspective and that is you are going to be up against a huge amount of competition if you a book on Amazon if we take a look at some statistics there are around 4 million books published to Amazon each year and that is including both traditionally published and self-published books but self-published books make up around half of that amount but also keep in mind that not all books are trackable on Amazon and what I mean by that is that we usually track books using an ISBN but there are a lot of books on Amazon that don't have an ISBN for example Le ebooks their Kindle books or now some no and low content books are not published with an ISBN so the amount of books actually added to Amazon each year would be probably a lot higher so yes you will have a lot of competition no matter what type of book you publish or in what Niche but the upside to this is that I personally think that it's a great idea to go where the demand is there is a reason why so many people publish books on Amazon and that is because they have an absolutely massive loyal customer base and there are a lot of people seeing real success with selling their books there number two Amazon provides some of the highest royalties in the publishing industry now royalties is the amount of money you receive from the sale of your book if you get a book deal with a traditional publisher within a Publishing House the royalties that they pay their authors are usually around around the 10 to 15% Mark there are also some other self-publishing platforms Barnes and Noble for example who will pay up to 55% in royalties but Amazon KDP will give you up to 70% royalties depending on how you price your book which all means that you get to keep more of the money from the sale of your book than what you can get through using other publishing platforms which brings me on to number three and that is that Amazon KDP isn't the only place to self-publish your books there are other platforms out there if you do not wish to use Amazon KDP although they aren't as popular as KDP or have access to such a large customer base like Amazon has but you might have specific reasons for why you do want to publish Elsewhere for example you might be really focused on getting your books into actual physical bookstores which can be easier to do through a platform like Ingram spark apparently Amazon char chares a much higher wholesale rate than Ingram spark so bookstores and other places like libraries will usually avoid Amazon to buy their books wholesale and instead buy through somewhere like Ingram spark who has much lower wholesale rates another example is that maybe you want to publish a book using some kind of specialized paper or a specialized book itself or some sort of special binding that you can't do through Amazon KDP so like spiral bound books or a book that has gold foil printing on its cover you can't do those sorts of things through Amazon KDP but you could do them through a self-publishing print on demand service like Lulu number four is that self-publishing is very free and very easy and that is mostly due to it being print on demand print on demand is the type of service where you don't have to purchase your book upfront in bulk and store inventory the company that you work with Will only print and ship your book once a customer has purchased it it is totally free to create an account with Amazon KDP it is totally free to publish your book with them and you only pay them anything once you have actually sold a book the process of uploading your book is also very easy and they provide a lot of information and a lot of help and support articles to help you get you through that whole process for the very first time and once you have done one you'll realize how easy it is and you'll just get faster at uploading your books number five is that there is no secret to success with self-publishing books on Amazon KDP people are always looking for the easy and quick way to make money the trick the hack the secret to selling more books or publishing a bestseller but what is it that makes some books sell thousands of thousands of dollars every single month and some sell nothing it can actually come down to a lot of things like the professionalism of the book The Cover and whether it's good enough to grab the customer's attention the niche you're in the price of your book whether you are getting negative or positive reviews just to name a few sometimes in the end it is just luck at the end of the day but there is no secret no Silver Bullet you just have to put in the hard work be patient be consistent and have a fantastic marketing plan and the truth is now that we are at number six is that there are a lot of people who do not end up making money self-publishing books on Amazon KDP and again this can be due to a lot of reasons mostly the same ones as I just mentioned before and especially if you just publish one book you don't do any kind of marketing or promotion you don't tell anybody about it but you just publish it and sit back and expect it to magically sell this will definitely contribute to your book not selling at all there are some people out there though who are not interested in actually making money from their book they may have had a lifelong dream to publish a book and by doing that they're just ticking something off their bucket list and that is totally fine and then there are people out there who do want to make some money from publishing their books but they just don't put in time or the effort needed to make it work or they just don't even get started at all the reality is that out of those 4 million plus books that get uploaded to Amazon every single year not every single one of them sells but on to number seven which is that there is also a lot of people who do make money self-publishing their books on Amazon KDP some of these people you hear about through YouTube maybe through their blog or through social media but the majority of people who do make money by using KDP you never hear about you can see these books on Amazon simply by doing research looking for the self-published books if if that's what you're interested in researching to get an idea of the potential income you could possibly make and look for these books and research the bestseller ranks which shows us how popular a book is with Amazon's customers and how much it could be selling if you have been skeptical about Amazon KDP or self-publishing in general or you think that the only people who are going to make money from it are the people that you see here on YouTube or on social media then I would say get on to Amazon and have a look around you can see which books are self-published or not you can see the bestseller ranks and the history of the bestseller Rank and the books s and you will see that there are so many books on Amazon making consistent income month after month self-published by ordinary people like you and me and these people are making a side income or a full-time income and sometimes even more than that through self-publishing their books on KDP I myself have shared so many videos on this channel of different books and different brands that are self-publishing books using Amazon KDP and seeing really great success number eight for us today is that did you know you can sell your KDP account let's say you publish a brand or a series of books and you do see success with these books and you just no longer want to run this business or you might have built up a KDP business purely to sell it and end up with a lump Su sum of money and you can do this there are websites out there where you can sell online businesses and I see people every day selling their KDP businesses some of them for pretty large amounts of money if this is something that does interest you then what you would need to do is you would need to build it up and establish the business getting it to the point of creating consistent income month after month but once you do this you can have the option of selling that KDP business if you want to number nine you can only publish three books per day this is a fairly recent rule with Amazon KDP in the past there was no limit as to how many books that you could publish in a day or forever which unfortunately did leave lead to a lot of really low quality books being published mainly in the low content book space and some people saw it as an opportunity to kind of just Spam really bad books into the marketplace in the hopes that if they had published 5,000 books hopefully a few of them or a very small percentage of them would actually sell Amazon brought in the three book per day rule though not because of the amount of low quality low content books that were being published but actually more around Ai and the concerns around how many AI generated books would enter into the marketplace if there was no limit onto how many books we can publish considering the concerns currently around Ai and in regards to whether people feel that it steals other people's work on not Amazon wants to limit how much this type of book can get onto Amazon until we understand more about using AI to create and publish books this three book per day limit should not be a problem for though because it takes time to create good quality books and this should be your focus rather than just publishing as many books as you possibly can regardless of the quality of them which brings us on to number 10 which is that it is actually really hard to create a good quality book most of us who are publishing books we probably not graphic designers or professional illustrators and a lot of the time we do try to do everything ourselves due to perhaps bud budget constraints so just not wanting to overspend on having a book created and we try to create them as cheaply as we can the actual creating of a book is pretty easy but making it look really good good enough to be able to compete with the bestselling books out there that are professionally made can be really hard now of course you can Outsource parts of your book to people who are Professionals in things like cover design but if you do want to create the books yourself the whole book yourself just keep in mind that your first book probably isn't going to be that great or your second but just keep making them even if you don't end up publishing them because you're not happy with the quality of them just keep making them to practice and get better research other books and look at what are they doing to make their books so professionall looking is it the fonts they're using on the cover is it the illustrations or the images inside are they using some kind of professional software to create a puzzle book or an activity book and in addition to just practicing creating these books try to incorporate some of those things these other books are doing to try to make yours as professional as you possibly can at the end of the day and this brings us to number 11 and that is even if you do make an amazing high quality professional book it still might not sell and this is where your patience and your persistence will really come into play there are professionally created traditionally published books who have a marketing budget behind them to promote them that still don't sell so it stands to reason that self-published books might not sell either sometimes it's hard not to take this personally especially when you have put so much time and effort maybe even money into having that book created and you personally think it is one of the most amazing books out there but you just need to publish it do not become emotionally attached to it Market it and then move on to the next one and just keep going and this is the last thing the number 12 thing that you need to know from this video and that is that you can get a publishing deal from self-publishing on Amazon KDP so if being traditionally published has always been a dream or a goal of yours but it's just not happening for you then consider using self-publishing as a way to get traditionally published through a Publishing House there are so many self-published authors who self-publish their books on Amazon KDP and then it sees some success it gets popular on Amazon and then get offered a publishing deal for the rights to that particular book or to future books I have seen this happen with a lot of fiction authors as well as children's picture book authors self-publishing can be a really great way to get your name out there and get your work out there and get seen by those traditional Publishers in a different way than usual and the usual way is that you would need to send out a bunch of query letters to try to land yourself a literary agent first and then that agent will then try to sell your book to a publisher and get you a publishing deal it can be very timec consuming and you hear of of most people getting a lot of re a lot of rejections and so if that method isn't working for you maybe just publish your book and in the meantime while you are waiting for a publisher to see your work you might even start to make a decent income from your self-published book so it would be a win-win either way so that is some of the most useful and important things that I think you need to know about Amazon KDP before publishing your book I hope it has helped give you more of an idea about the pros and cons of of self-publishing and using Amazon KDP in particular to decide and work out if it is the right path for you to take thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Self Publishing Central

Views: 10,994

Keywords: kdp activity books, amazon kdp activity books, how to create activity books for kdp, kdp low content books, kdp low content publishing, low content kdp, low content books, low content books amazon, kdp publishing, how to make money on amazon, amazon kdp, kdp coloring book, kdp coloring book niche, low content publishing kdp, paul marles, kdp activity book niche, low content coloring book, how to make a coloring book, self publishing on amazon 2024

Id: nqTL1Hec6pw

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024