Amazon Kindle Books – My First Sale!

I am excited to put up this post because I’m now officially an Amazon published author (under a pen name, though)!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I gave myself a goal to put up my first kindle book in November. I was able to beat my deadlines and actually put up my book at the start of this month. I’m so glad I did it because I learned a lot about the process of launching, how to market your book, and how to get reviews.

How I Launched My Book

Here were the steps I took to launch my book:

1. First of all, I outsourced a writer to write the book. Turns out the writer was no good at all and I ended up basically rewriting the whole thing, unfortunately.
2. Before my launch, I used this link as a resource to understand the right pricing and marketing strategies to implement.
3. I designed my own book cover.
4. I used a service from Fiverr to help me format my book. I plan to format my books myself in the future. The problem with sending off my book for formatting is that if I wanted to edit the book later, I wouldn’t have the option to because I wouldn’t have the editable file.
5. I created the book under a pen name. As it was my first book, I was quite scared to put it under my real name.

Pricing Strategy + After Launch Marketing

After I launched the book, I used KDP select free promotion and priced the book at $0 for 5 days. To my surprise, I was getting hundreds of downloads which led to this:

^Lol sorry, I didn’t know the resolution was going to be so bad. But basically I was ranked #1 in two categories and #464 in the whole free kindle store. Does that even help at all? Not sure. But I was proud of it regardless.

• I made a new Facebook page with my pen name and joined a bunch of Kindle book groups to post about my new launch.
• I also submitted my book on a bunch of free kindle websites. I found out a lot of these require payment now for marketing (possible idea – make a site for kindle promotion and charge a fee?). Personally I don’t think this is worth it unless your book is selling for $2.99 or more and you have confidence it is a great book.

My Mistakes with My First Kindle Book Launch

1st mistake: Creating a book in a niche that was very low in the Kindle Store best seller rankings.

I haven’t been getting many sales because not many people seem to care about purchasing books in my niche. However the great thing about this is I don’t have much competition, and I’m on the first page of results when searching for the topic.

Learning: Write books in niches that have best sellers at #10,000 or better in the Kindle Store.

2nd mistake: Not adding pictures

I received two comments saying they wanted pictures in the book because it was hard to tell what referred to what. With my book topic, it was pretty necessary to have pictures but it was hard to find images that were free to use. I’m going to try and get in touch with the Fiverr guy and ask if I could get the editable word doc to insert pictures.

Learning: If the book requires pictures, add it.

Earnings?

I’m excited to say, I’ve made 3 sales so far! It’s not much but it’s only been a week. Just getting one sale pretty much made me realize this route IS possible. Imagine, if I put out 100 of these books, I could pretty much quit my job!

Here was my math:

If I wanted to make a $60k salary, I’d need to make at least $5k a month. This equates to about $170 a day. That amount equates to at least 80-90 books released if you’re selling a book a day at $2.99 (keeping $2.07 of profits per sale).

So the route is possible! Just to not put all my eggs in one basket, I’m going to still work on my Etsy store as well as Fiverr. Got to explore every route!

Conclusion

My biggest advice is to just do it, at least once. Get familiarized with the process. Then keep churning out Amazon kindle books and learning. That’s what I’m going to do at least. Will keep you updated on my progress.