Welcome to Amazon KDP 2024: Let Me Show You How to Win

so I've been building my Amazon KDP business for over seven years now making well over seven figures from it as well as reviewing thousands of other books working with my students and over time I've noticed some patterns on what makes someone successful with Amazon KDP and what makes someone fail with this business so in this video I'll share with you exactly what I found and show you how you can succeed so real quick if you're new to the channel my name is Sean and I built a seven figure publishing business that I sold and now I'm building my new KDP account so if you want no BS publishing advice from someone who's actually doing it then make sure to subscribe and if you want a free 80-minute master class on how to build a successful KDP business besides what you'll learn in this video then I also have another training you guys can check it out in the description below all right let me show you how to win on Amazon KDP this year so the very first thing you have to be really careful with is picking a niche so when it comes to picking a niche you got to make sure that it's a niche that you're passionate about as well as there's demand to it you got to have both right so you know demand makes money right obviously if there's no demand you should not even be considering that Niche so before you start publishing a book before you start writing a single word you have to check if there are other people buying books on the topic because that shows that it's profitable right if nobody else is publishing a book on the topic it's probably because it's not profitable and nine times out of 10 you should probably not make a book on it so you need that proof that there are other books selling but that is a demand okay passion is what keeps you going so yes you can start making money but if you're not passionate about the topic it's probably not going to get you you know excited Ed waking up every single day and working on this business right although I will say though that this is subjective you know what makes you passionate about a topic because you could be passionate about a niche right which is awesome but you could also be passionate about the fact that you're making money although you have zero interest in the niche because to be completely honest sometimes that was the case with me like I published books in a niche that I didn't really care for but it was profitable and you know I was passionate about the money so it kept me going right so as long as you're publishing good books it could be either way but that is the first thing you got to keep in mind so what you want to do is search the Amazon bestseller categories get some ideas and from there you can check each topic each ideas that you get and you want to find books with less than 880,000 BSR so as an example this is the best sell those categories so you just want to go here you can go into categories that you're interested in uh but basically you start checking each book you know asking yourself what are the topics so these are a lot of fiction books so we can Niche down further more so I Niche down into crafts hobbies and home you can Niche down into sub niches as well so we got a water coloring book right we have rais bit gardening so this is a topic that popped up so you want to take notes on that and we can go and check that later on right we got another gardening book we got another gardening book so there's a lot of gardening book that pops up and that is a pattern that you want to keep in mind same as a book on organizing or decluttering decluttering is another topic that we can go and check so since rais gardening was a topic that kept popping up you just go and type that in in the search bar now and then you want to check if there are other books uh on this topic below 80,000 BSR so I have the book beam plugins so not only does it tell me the best sellers rank of the book but also how much it's making so if you guys want to check out book beam the link is below this video you don't have to get it though it is a paid tool but I personally think it's very very useful uh so book beam tells me that this is 1,231 in books so it's way way below 880,000 and that is why it's doing really well typically if the the book is about 880,000 BSR it's doing an average of5 $0000 a month which is a good enough number to tell us that okay it's profitable we can make at least $500 a month right and go and publish a book on it so same as this one this is doing $221 a day this is doing $29 every single day so $600 a month with low reviews and a bad review ratio so that is also another good sign is if a book is successful with a low review or bad review ratio that is a really good sign that we don't need a lot of reviews to go and you know make money in this Niche so that is bonus points for the keyword rais bit gardening for beginners so the next thing you want to consider is the type of books right that you want to publish so people have different ways of categorizing this but basically there's low content books there's medium content books and there are high content books low content or literally low in content so we're talking journals planners very very content inside the book medium content has a little more so you know something like puzzle books uh trivia books more content than low content but less content than high content high content is uh like a book that we just looked at rais B gardening those are ful length uh actual you know bunch of text a bunch of images those kind of things right so that is high content book what you want to do is you want to start with one type of book then expand to others later you don't want to switch around hop around all the time uh so typically low content book because the content is lower it's much much easier to make right very cheap very quick to make medium content will be uh a little more expensive and it'll take a little more time just because you got to add more content high content will be the same concept right it's going to take longer and more expensive to make just because you got to add a lot of text a lot of images so if you look at this graph here like I said low content super easy to make but here's the thing just because something is easy to do does not make it good okay because if something is easy to do 99% of the people out there is going to do the same exact things most people will stay with low content just because it's easy almost free to make these books and it's comfortable for them right so it's uh very low bear of entry and if you stay here publishing low content books you're going to be competing with the most amount of people and that's why usually you make the least amount of money so then if you go and do something a little harder right which most people aren't willing to do and you go and venture out into medium content books now your competition is cut significantly right so typically you make more money plus you can price your book higher and stuff like that so you make more money there then now if you're doing high content right it's going to take the longest it's going to you know cost some money Outsourcing your task or if you do it yourself it's going to take a lot of time right but not a lot of people are willing to do that which could be a good thing because you're competing with a lot less people and typically you make the most amount of money here so you know one is not better than the other but I would honestly uh work towards high content but you don't have to start with high content because if you're just getting started it's kind of scary right so you know you can start with low content but have this idea or goal in mind that you want to work towards high content books okay another thing is you can also combine high content low content once again this is something that I don't recommend for someone who's just getting started but once you kind of have an experience publishing you can go and definitely do this so this brand right here uh just publishes Christian books and she's doing $226,000 a month in Revenue just from three books and this is a high content book right so we have a Bible study workbook for Women On Letting Go of fear and anxiety and this probably is like more medium content a guided Bible study reading plan to read the Bible in 52 weeks and then we have a prayer Journal so this is like a typical low medium content book so once again you can combine it under a brand but typically you want to start with one get really good at it and then you can go from there this is an example of a medium content specifically coloring book brand and she's doing amazing she's doing $192,000 a month in revenue and it's just simple coloring uh books so this is something you can make as well if you enjoy making these books and if you enjoy making children's books uh you can do something like Alicia ortego here she's crushing it with over over $225,000 a month in Revenue probably around 40,000 or more if you count the other formats as well so what you want to do is pick one type of book and get really really good at creating those books before you go and venture out into making other types of books the reason why is because even though these are all books that you can make through the Amazon KDP program the way you make these books are completely different you know the way you make low content books uh and the skills you need for it is different than the skills you need to make high content books or children's books low Med Med content books requires more design skills right as you can see or you got to hire someone that's good at that high content books are more text based so you have to get good at writing or you got to hire someone that's good at writing so that's why you want to be excellent in making one book type not mediocre in all of it the next thing you got to keep in mind is your positioning so you got to decide on your positioning positioning is your unique selling point right every single book you publish you need a USB so unique selling point so the big question you got to ask every single time is how is your book different than others right if you're just making the same type of book that everyone else is making and there's literally nothing special about your book why would people buy that right so you got to ask yourself once again how's your book different than others and why would people buy your book over others because if you have absolutely no unique selling point then the only way to stand out is either you get more reviews which takes time right it takes time to get more reviews than your competitors uh or you you have to price it lower so a lot of people do this they create the exact same book nothing special but then it's cheaper than everybody else right then somebody else will come in and price it cheaper and then now you got to price it even cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and everybody's racing to the bottom and literally no one makes money you don't want to do this and the third way to stand out is better marketing you know so you can have a book that's nothing special but you can just Market it better and you can definitely make sales but this will cost time cost money right obviously you got to learn marketing it's possible I recommend every want to learn marketing but it's not the fastest way to stand out so this is exactly what you don't want to do right you don't want to just publish a generic book and a generic keyword that everyone else is doing with the exact same design style right uh no reviews and price it at the lowest possible price to the point where you're not making any sales definitely do not do this so here are some examples of a good USB right actual unique selling propositions number one is you have a new angle so this is a unique twist to a popular theme so instead of going out and Publishing just another dinosaur coloring book for kids you know this book got Dino Bots coloring books it's like a robot dinosaur it's a unique twist to a popular keyword right so this is a good example of a new angle USP another one is you could just have a really epic cover so the content is the same right it's just another interesting fact book but the book cover just stands out the design is completely different than everyone else so you know the content is the same but better packaging and this is how this uh pen named Jordan Moore just blew up right it's the same kind of trivia you know random fact book but his cover this Einstein and his brain exploding with a bunch of things popping up he was the very first guy who did that and he became extremely successful this book was literally number one in the entire Amazon bookstore so another USB example is just giving results fast or promising fast results right so saving time is a huge value for the reader so if all your competitors have complete guys as an example uh and you can't really do something more complete than complete guides right so instead you take a new approach like faster or simpler right so this one personal finance quick start guide you know this is a good competitive Advantage you have to all the personal finance complete guides out there because a lot of times people don't want a super in-depth book right they just want to get their results faster so these quick start guys work really well and with the exact same concept if all your competitors have Quick Start guys then you can come up with a complete guide because that is your USP right now you have a more in-depth detailed book than others so my point is you got to think of ways to stand out every single time so most people just look at the best-selling book and they just rip it off do the exact same thing but with less reviews and a cheaper price and that is not how you do it right yes you do have to model what's working so you can take maybe you know bits and pieces of what they do uh that's good but you got to add your own unique twist to it all right the next one is be crystal clear on your audience so you got to really ask yourself who is your audience right you want to create your customer Avatar so you know are you creating books for men do you write books for women girls boys is it for kids adults is it a certain religion right like or is it for people with certain interests you got to be super clear on that let me show you some examples so this uh person right here Shannon Roberts only publishes Christian books right basically prayer journals uh for teen girls prayer journal for women uh and just basically those kind of books and she does extremely well she makes $94,000 a month just from paperback right not counting Kindle and spiral bound um spiralbound also does another $36,000 so she's doing over $114,000 a month in Revenue which is insane this is another example Fantastical bedtime stories for stressed out adults so your audience is specifically stressed out adults right and this book is for that this is another example so this pen name specializes in creating horror books right so horror calling books horror War search uh serial killer War search whatever so you know horror lovers would love these kind of books but it would be weird if you go and publish one book on freak of beauty horror coloring book for adults and then the next book you go and publish a prayer journal for teen girls right it just does not mix and that's why you got to be super clear on who your customer is and only publish books that they would enjoy okay and nothing else and obviously that is for under one pen name so if you want to go and publish a different kind of book you can create a new pen name and do that again because you can create unlimited amount of pen name but my point is uh it kind of ties back into this slide right here where I say the rule of three okay so you don't want to give up on a niche until you publish three books on it and it all flops so let's say you decide that horror coloring book is the the niche that you want to build that's your audience right you want to publish at least three books on it and if all three books flop it does not do well then you can go and test out something else but until you publish three books you don't know if it's the book that you published as the issue or if it's the topic right is it that the horror calling book Niche is just not profitable or is it simply that you didn't publish a book that's good enough so once again if you try just once or twice you don't know if it's the niche or if your book was simply not good so you want to keep improving your craft at every single book and you want to ask yourself honestly is my book genuinely as good as what's currently on the market which brings me to the next tip which is to get better every single time right because your first book will suck like there's no avoiding it you know it's just a part of the business and you want to improve your next book based on feedback when I say feedback it's book reviews so what people say in the reviews what they like what they didn't like you want to incorporate that and then make the next book better okay so it's a skill that takes practice but you can learn this you know it's just trial and error so the next tip for you guys is that you guys have to understand that keyword in your book cover is literally the most important thing if you want to make money okay in order of priority on what is the most important thing in this business is profitable keywords as number one like you can have the most amazing book cover you can have 2,000 reviews you can have an amazing title right you can have a epic A+ content description everything but if it's not in a profitable keyword you will never make money okay compared to that if you actually have a good keyword your book cover can kind be bad you can have low reviews bad title A+ content everything and your book can still sell just because there's Demand on that keyword so it's that important okay so in order of priority once again profitable keyword number one and then the book cover in terms of the book listing right the packaging it probably carries 80 to 90% of the sales okay from there it's the reviews then the title A Plus content the book cover is actually higher than the reviews because if you have an epic amazing book cover even if you have lower reviews than your competitors people will still buy it just because the book cover is so beautiful okay so it's so so so important so you definitely want to take this down like literally note this down and just remember keywords and book cover that's the two thing if you can just Master these two things you will do really really well in this business okay so this goes back to what I always talk about is that people design book covers thems on canva right and they do it for free which is fine if you're good at designing right but if you suck at designing or if you're just getting started you better learn how to do it or if you don't want to do that then you better Outsource it to someone who's good at designing because once again it's the most important step like you don't want to try and save some money when you can Outsource this to a professional for literally 10 20 30 bucks and get a pretty decent book cover so if you're going to Outsource anything that should be the first thing so in terms of Outsourcing your book cover uh Fiverr is the best way the easiest way to do so so always you have to do is go to Fiverr right I'll leave a link below this video but type in book cover and from there you will see a lot of options here some are once again you see it's 200 bucks there's $10 option there's the 80 bucks option like there's many different options and typically you get what you pay for but not all the time right sometimes you can pay 10 20 30 40 bucks and then you can get a really good design compared to when you pay 200 bucks right so you want to always look at the samples and then look at the reviews and then if you like what you see you can go and order from there so I pay $115 per book cover right now but I didn't start off paying that much right I actually started off paying five bucks for my book cover then whatever profit I made from my first book I reinvested back into making a better book number two right I paid more for the book cover and made a better book number two and then that profit I reinvested into making a book better by you know hiring someone better right and I just kept going from there so you guys can go and find uh book cover designers yourself on Fiverr but I will also leave a link below this video to some of the ones that I personally work with and that I recommend that I think is very very good quality for the price that you're paying so this one as an example Olina is just $30 but you can see that the quality is really really good okay so once again I'll leave a link below this video the next thing I want you guys to understand is it's better to have a small slice of a big pie than a Big Slice of a small pie so you make more money getting a small slice of a big pie than a Big Slice of a tiny pie so what I mean by this is it's better to carve a small space in a big keyword that's you know discovered everybody knows about the keyword we know that it's super profitable but it's competitive right it's better to go into that and carve a small space then try to find a tiny Niche that nobody knows that you can go and dominate okay so you want to stop chasing untapped keywords or small low competition one it's better to win big in big keywords because all the best earning books all the top earning self-publishers are in major keywords everyone already knows they're not out there trying to find ontap keywords nothing they just go into a big keyword and then they just make a better book than everyone else so that they stand out as an example book beam has this feature called The Niche Finder and only book beam does this and I think it's one of the coolest ways to do uh keyword research or basically finding top selling books but you can set a preset right so like top selling self-published books these are all the top selling books right now so you know obviously some of them are from huge authors or people with authority but some of these you know that's selling really well we got food and snacks coloring book it's just a simple adult calling book that's the keyword and you know it's selling extremely well it's doing like 40K a month right this one right here cozy spaces coloring book for adults once again the keyword is simply coloring books right for adults and it's doing really well this one adults swear words coloring book the keyword everyone knows this adult swear words cing book right doing extremely well same as this one stop overthinking literally everyone knows this keyword but they just have a better book better positioning and it's doing 40K a month so this is what I mean is all the top Publishers they're not trying to find small keywords they just focus on making a better quality book than everyone else that's in the same keyword and they carve out their space and that is same as me right most of my bestsellers are in big keywords as well so what you want to do is find books in these big keywords that's very profitable where they're selling but also with low reviews so the easiest way to do this once again is book beam so you can actually filter this to let's say you know you want to find books that are selling well so less than 35,000 BSR but let's say just below 50 reviews here and just like that we have all the best sellers that are making a lot of money selling really well but with less than 50 reviews so going back to this book right cozy space coloring book 20 reviews and it's doing well so 20 reviews is nothing like we can get more reviews than in this right so this is a good keyword to go into we also got this one this is interesting so we got a rustic table as a keyword I've never seen this before but it's selling really well it's a 432 BSR with only 18 reviews that's amazing we got Ethiopian Bible in English uh complete 88 books which is pretty crazy because it's at 840 BSR with just nine reviews so as long as you can find even just one of these books where you know it's selling in a big keyword with just low reviews then that is a good sign that you can come in and you don't need a of reviews to compete all right and the final tip is you have to take advantage of the honeymoon period so once you publish a book the first 30 days Amazon gives you preferential treatment it'll show you a book to more people to test if the book actually sells or not so this is called the honey moon period once again it lasts for 30 days and it's very very important that you take advantage of this right and show Amazon that your book gets reviews and sales so that they can go and push it to more people if you don't do this if you literally upload for forget do nothing then it just tells Amazon that no one wants your book right so then they will go and drop it to page 2 3 4 5 10 20 till no one sees it again so it's very very important once again the first 30 days you achieve a low BSR and collect reviews this is called launching the book right so book launch is very important if you need help on how to do this I filmed a complete book launch guide so I'll leave a link to this video in the description all right guys so that is how you win an Amazon KDP uh in 2024 and yond okay so if you can nail these steps you will do extremely well and if you want more of a step-by-step tutorial on what I just talked about then watch this video then I also filmed a complete Amazon KDP tutorial for beginners so make sure to go watch that next right here

Channel: Sean Dollwet

Views: 14,766

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: n2hUQvGZdiI

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024