The Why, What and How of Kindle Direct Publishing?

Last Updated on January 29, 2019 by Jordan Alexo

The sound of money! What is the sound of money? I don’t know! Nowadays, it’s nothing more than digits in bank account or dashboard. But we all want to make more money. So we can live the good life! But what can we do? Where to start? How can you make money online?

And that’s where Kindle publishing comes in. Let’s not get complicated! Kindle publishing is a book business and like any other business we build one for the purpose of making money. In the process of making money, we also help people by providing products or services. In this case, your products are books.

I want to start this guide by being simple and focusing on what really matters without getting all emotionally wet. In other words, pretending we are building a business around something we are passionate about, or some other idea out there.

Yes, businesses don’t need to be around your passions. You don’t even need to like what you are doing. Do I like to publish books in Amazon? Not really! So why do I do it? Because I enjoy building businesses online and the money I make from them.

Why and What is Kindle Publishing?

I already provided a brief explanation but Kindle publishing is a book business. See Amazon has a program called Kindle Direct Publishing. All you need to do to join their program is go here and sign up. Once you have an account, you can start publishing books inside of Amazon. And you can build a very profitable business averaging between $5.000 to $10.000 per month. Of course, the earnings depend on the amount of books you have published and their niches.

Not all niches are as profitable. For instance, the diet niche is far more profitable than the martial art niche. For this reason, you can earn potentially more money by publishing diet books. I am not saying, you should go ahead and do this because at the same time, the diet niche is one of the most competitive niches in Amazon.

Why Kindle Publishing?

So now you know this is a book business. Do you need to love this business? Do you need to melt your heart away by publishing books? No, but hey doing $5.000 or even just an extra $1.000 per month is always helpful!

You don’t need to be passionate about this despite what other people out there say. I like to be brutally honest about building businesses online. So why this business and not any other one online?

Easy…

1 – Taking advantage from Amazon

Amazon is the biggest e-commerce website in the world.

“Amazon is on top. On Monday, it surpassed Microsoft to become the largest publicly traded company in the U.S. by market cap, with a current valuation of $789 billion. Apple, its fierce competitor, has fallen to fourth place, trailing both Microsoft and Alphabet.”  taken from Cnbc.com

• This means you have billions of potential customers.
• Amazon is a big company and doesn’t have problems paying your earnings
• You don’t need to waste time building a website. Learning WordPress, search engine optimization or paid Advertisement.

2 – Step-by-step process

I don’t know any other business online where you basically have formula. Yes, there are some variants in Kindle publishing as you’ll understand later. But in most part, you can basically follow a step-by-step formula and make money by selling your books. In comparison to affiliate marketing, product creation etc…

You have so many different ways. With affiliate marketing (selling products from other people) are you going to build an email list? How do you create an effective opt-in page? What are the products you are going to promote? The path isn’t as clear as with Kindle publishing.

Here you can follow a step-by-step approach and succeed. The only thing that changes from one publisher to another are the topics one chooses to publish their books. But all the rest is pretty straightforward. For this reason, this is an ideal business for beginners. Seeing that you are able to make money online immediately gets you pumped up. Afterward, you probably will feel more motivated to build a business selling your products or something else.

What are the problems with Kindle Publishing?

You don’t have many skills you can apply into other online businesses. I mean, you publish books and that’s what you do. Does that help you later on with affiliate marketing or something else? Nope! Perhaps, that’s the only problem I see with this business. Besides, your earnings are tied between $5.000 to $10.000 monthly and afterward it starts getting really hard for you to make more money.

I am not saying there aren’t publishers doing more money than this but we need to consider the pricing of the books. You are going to sell:

• E-Books at $2.99. Amazon takes 30% of your royalties so you only earn $2.00
• Paperbacks can range between $10 to $20 and once again Amazon takes 30%

In other words, you are selling cheap products and the way you make money is by selling in quantity. For this reason, you reach a point where it starts getting really hard for you to make more money with your Kindle publishing business.

Should you write your own books?

No, you shouldn’t. Okay… it depends if you are a good writer and in a tight budget then go ahead and write your own books. But it isn’t the way I recommend. Instead I have a team of ghostwriters. I go to this company “e-writer solutions” and order my books.

My work as a publisher is being able to find hot book titles inside of Amazon.  You may also call titles: keywords, or search terms. For instance:

• Paleo for beginners
• Bodybuilding
• Computer science

Those are all examples of keywords or book titles. Your job is seeing whether or not these keywords are profitable. In other words, if people are searching and purchasing these books in Amazon. Once you are able to find profitable keywords, then you head over to the ghostwriter company and order those books. As you may imagine, this way you can easily scale up your business. You can immediately order 3 or more books and publish them after 15 days.

Why you shouldn’t write your own books? It’s time consuming. If you want to become a known author then go ahead and write your own books. But in my case, I am not an author rather a publisher. I publish books to make money.

If I wrote my own books then it would take me forever to scale up my business. You probably take a month or more to write a high quality book. After you concluded your book, I already published 3 or more during that period of time.

The math is easy!

More books equal to more money. Besides the other issue about writing your books is you probably will need to write about boring content you don’t have a clue about. Often you build businesses around other people’s passions, needs and problems. For this reason, what you are passionate about in life might not be something that is profitable in Amazon.

How to Get Started with Kindle Publishing?

Step 1) Go to KDP Amazon website and create an account. Don’t worry it is completely free. In fact, if you wrote your own books this would be a free business.

Step 2) Get your FREE Kindle publishing quick guide. I explain the, “7 Step Formula: How to publish your first $300 to $800 book”. Just go right below add your email address and sign up.

Step 3) After you subscribe to my email newsletter. I will also send emails explain everything you need to know about self-publishing. So don’t pay close attention daily to your email inbox. Don’t miss these secret tips!

Any question? Just leave it in the comment section right below. Thanks for reading!