I thought that I would write a post for you telling you some tips for publishing on Kindle. In my opinion, it is one of the easiest ways to make money at the moment.
Not overnight riches, but a steadily increasing ongoing income.
I currently have nearly 20 titles selling. All apart from 1 are non-fiction.
In no particular order, here are my top 10 tips:
1. See what is already selling. If you are going to write about dog training, then look at the dog training category (if it exists) and see what the top 5 books are. As a rough estimate, if a book is ranked under 50,000 then it is selling more than a copy a day.
2. I advise selling your book at $2.99 rather than $0.99. At this price you will be getting 70% royalties rather than 35% royalties. So, you will get approximately $2 a sale rather than 35c a sale. Or putting it another way, to make the same money at $0.99, you will need to sell about 6 times as many copies. Personally, I have not found that sales differ at all between the 0.99 and $2.99 pricepoints.
3. Make sure that your cover is high quality. You can get some really good covers done for $5 on fiverr.com . Make sure that the title of your book is clearly visible even at the smallest size. People scan, so you want to let them read your title when scanning.
4. Before people buy, over 80% will look inside your book at the sample which Amazon gives for free. Make sure that it is enticing, and if possible actually presells your book.
5. Make sure to tell your customers to leave a review and give a link to your Amazon page. If your book is not live yet, then create a redirect link which you can fill in later.
6. Put a link in your ebook to an optin page. When you release your next book, you will already have a list that knows you and are likely to buy your next one.
7. Try and release books on the same or a similar topic. This means that you can cross promote within your books and will make a massive difference on your bottom line.
8. Reviews make a massive difference. In any honest way possible, gets reviews for your book. Send your book as gift to people, send vouchers for the value of your book etc.
9. The best salesletter that you have is the description. Use it well and answer any questions that a potential customer may have so that they can make an easy purchase. At the low pricepoint, it is an impulse buy. They only need to click one button to purchase. Make it easy for them to click that button.
10. Carry on creating books. If the first isn’t successful then try in a different niche or from a different angle. At some point you will have a ‘success’. That makes it far easier to make the next success.
Would love to hear any tips that you have or if you disagree with anything I have said.
Keeping it real in an unreal world,
Ben Shaffer