EBooks: Produce, Promote & Profit including Selling on Kindle

Check out Jason's earnings on some of his monthly takings from selling You can sell eBooks and earn money online on Kindle Direct Publishing I focused strictly on content with my method of madness with no intention of producing.
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Today, Michelle Deery provides the pros and cons of each ebook-selling option so you can decide. Have you just finished polishing up your brand new ebook? Give yourself a pat on the back! Now the hard work starts. You can choose to sell your ebook on your own website or you can sell it on the popular shopping website, Amazon. Take some time to consider your options, though, as the selling platform you choose plays a huge role in the overall success of your ebook.

Do you already have your own personalized blog or freelancing website? Are you considering setting up a new website or online shop to showcase your ebook on your own domain? Where should you sell your ebook? The answer depends on the amount of time and budget you can commit to the publishing and marketing your ebook.

However, if you have already created a substantial following, there is no reason not to publish on your own website, as you will profit more from each sale. Have a think through these ebook-selling options today so you can receive greater rewards for all of the hard work you put into writing your ebook. Michelle Deery is a writer who specializes in writing blog posts and articles about digital products.

She is a team member of Heroic Search in Tulsa and assists with digital marketing. Hello there, thank you for the great article I am a newbie as an author … starting out this is a very good knowledge to have. I know I have options and what to do with either one. Maybe I will try one on one book and the other on the other book. Our book is about Golf Long Driving. It is called Long And Straight. Hi Ray, Thanks for writing in. Glad you found the article helpful — best of luck with the book. You must be killing it on the golf course! I just wanted to thank you for this. I did this for a period of 3 days and I got over 1, downloads.

Sales have gone up since then. I do no less than 30 sales per week of my book Groupie Chronicles since the free promo. These are very good tips for publishing your ebook with Amazon. I have a problem and infact need help from anyone. I have 2 books published on Amazon.

The first book is on Google first page for its keyword,but it does not make any sales. The second book is also on Google second page for its keyword and making sales slowly. Can someone tell me the short fall of the first book? Instead you put a link to a fat burning ad. I for one enjoy it when new authors put links to their E-published content. Or are at least interested in the self publishing world.

I think we all do. Or whatever it is you just did. Hello just curious but What are the legal impilcations if your book mentions real life places e. New York, public hoildays or your version of the men in black. No not the movie. I really want to get my books out there! Any help would be greatly appreciated. In your Amazon Author Dashboard, go to Bookshelf. Once your book is enrolled in KDP Select and is available for sale on our website, you will be able to schedule free book promotions in two ways:.

The Promotions Manager will allow you to schedule one or more free promotions, edit or delete a scheduled free promotion, or stop an ongoing free promotion. If you choose to stop an ongoing promotion, it can take from a few minutes to several hours for the action to take effect. Thank you so much, WJ Davies. I knew I was being a complete idiot. Thanks ever so much for the advice. Am still in the free promotion phase but doing really well so far, currently 36th in the Suspense Free downloads list. Think this has a lot to do with some of the things you mention in your article.

Waiting to see what will happen on Friday when it goes back to priced. Cheers for the guidance. Am now eagerly working on my follow-up novels which I have been jotting for ages! Hey, thanks for your blog post, it was very useful to read through, a great checklist! I can only see the paid on KDP.

Where do I get this info? I can certainly vouch for using KDP Select to boost sales. I had five and a half thousand downloads by the end of Sunday and the book stayed at No. That is an awesome reaction to your free promotion. I published my very adorable if I do say so myself on KDP and then offered a free promotion for two days and only had 23 downloads.

So I strongly suspect that lots of people just download free books whenever they come across them. My first promo day was done without sending a word anywere — just people saw the book and took it. That day there were downloads, because I decided that was enough for them and stopped the promotion.

Secrets behind Reality was downloaded times with absolutely NO reviews, after that the sales went to copies a day and then 0 for the past 2 days. Oh, Debbie, I only now see that your comment was not addressed to me. Hi Marina, No problem at all.

How to Increase Your Amazon Kindle Book Sales by % in a Week

Good luck with your book and I will check out the blog you recommended anyway. I appreciate any advice! A little late to the party but wanted to share my experience with KDP. I helped my dad publish his novel, The Runaway Kindle in December of We had a few sales but it sat languishing in the 6-figure of sales I think it was , in its category. I tried the KDP program two separate times about 4 months apart and gave away about copies which resulted in some sales — but for the most part, total sales were still in double digits.

The third time I tried it I found every free announcement site on the web including Twitter and Facebook. I made my announcements a couple days previous to the launch, the day before the launch, the day of the launch, halfway through the free period and on the last day. Over 22, downloads in 5 days which resulted in over sales over the next 3 months and 30 pretty positive reviews. Run your campaign towards the beginning of the month so you can capture the sales during that month. The beauty of the program is that you can do it every 90 days. I just consider these quarterly sales numbers.

This is gold, and new to me: One other thing I should add: My most success came with starting a 5-day campaign on a Saturday and wrapping it up on the following Wednesday. Horrible download numbers around holidays. Could you please clarify my doubt? Same royalties as described in the post from Amazon. How long do you normally have to wait to get sales going up?

Here is my question I am self publishing using create space are you telling me that the only way to get on K-amazon is to not allow create space to sell any books of mines? And neither can any of you keep pushing until something happens good luck fellow Authors its your year. Good to hear about your book coming out. Best of luck with it. See the comment three above this one my response to Fahran above. This is an awesome post!

Or it was listed there as well after the KDP Promotion ended? Free downloads count towards that list, as do paid. So some people will see you at the top of those lists regardless of whether free or paid. It did slowly go down again after the big rush, but you do get some time at the top which also increases cross-sells.

Thank you for the post. Your post contained some useful information. Good to hear about your book. I wrote my book in MS Word, and then spent the 6 hours or so massaging the styles. One other thing you could consider is: If you wanted, you could outsource that part: Thanks a lot for the great advice! Love your idea of going free for awhile. I am new to Kindle. Immediately after publishing, i enrolled 5 days free promotion.

But still didnt see any sales. Is it a wrong step? How Kindle readers will come to know about my book? I just published my first book and was going to run a free promo on it. Did any one here have reviews already before they ran their promos? I had two reviews when I did my first giveaway. By the time I did my third and figured out how to do it right I had two dozen reviews. The point of the promo is to get the reviews. I got a couple out of the promos. I took your advice and I got downloads from zero in the previous week!

Then it went back to zero! Funny thing is the folks who have read it tell me they were splitting their sides laughing…. Just wanted to add a word of warning that I learned the hard way today: If you edit your book after your free period or anytime, I suppose , you will lose your rankings in all categories! My new release Kindle Gold: I had close to 2, free downloads and I was 1 in one category and 3 in another. But, after the free download period, I added in a bonus chapter that some customers were asking about. After my book was re-uploaded, ALL of my rankings went away.

Interesting note there about changing content and influence on sales. I noticed that if you change catagory mid promotion then you can suddenly lose ranking position big time! Just an extra note, I saw an article earlier about setting up a Facebook fan page. It is a work in progress but any comments and suggestions welcome. Hey Michael, Great to know. That happened to me too!! I went ahead and ran my KDP promo and announced it beforehand, as Jay suggested. I think I was a little too tentative.

Many thanks Tristan, It is a bit strange having the real thing here. I figured if I was going to have a stab at it then I may as well put the effort in. Even if it all fails, I have a physical copy. I have read these comments here with interest and have now tried to follow your advice, but I am not sure it worked out so well, so therefore I ask about an honest feedback.

I have just published a Kindle with essays made from interviews with muslim women on equality. I had five days promotion and I had only downloads. The link to the kindle is: There were 6, free downloads , Nov , with most of them in the first three days. Now I want to do two days free on my sequel, but I changed internet providers in December and lost all my files on advertising. I think they really help. I have a promo period coming up in june so I would be very interested in learning more. This is a great article. I took a lot of time with my book, did a book trailer and everything, view here at http: I have read all of the comments here and found it to be very insightful.

I joined KDP on August 12, and immediately used the 5 day free promotion. I let everyone on my contact lists on my cellphone and FB know it would be Free. I had about downloads during that Free Trial. After the trial ended I had about 20 sales, but I was excited to have any at all being an unknown author. Suddenly my book was ranked at 6, I had about downloads and more international sales and downloads.

I eventually re-edited my book and re-released 2 editions, a short-version which is 64 pages and a longer version which is 95 pages. I now have 11 reviews and many people who have emailed me, texted,tweeted and LinkedIn me stating they will be posting more reviews. I also changed the cover. I am currently in a Free trial with a steady download of about per day from every country except Italy and whatever BR is.

Now it is in the proper category of Romance, adult, thriller and inspite the increased number of downloads the books have never been rated higher than in the Kindle store during the Free trial. I would love some constructive advice as to what I can do to increase my sales and I appreciate your input in this forum. I love this article, very insightful. I have written 3 full novels over the last 2 years and am planning on publishing them on amazon soon, once I get over the nervous knots.. I write under different pen names. Would I have to open a new account for each name? In terms of pen names: You could try pinging Amazon an email.

I have just one KDP account in my real name and that works fine in terms of admin, royalties etc. Update, I am at the end of day 1 of a 72 hour promotion. I agree with you on enrolling with KDP. My cousin has a self book titled Ignite your life. It has been downloader , in just one day! But here again, its all about quality. Just a quick update.

The KDP Select Experiment: Results

Some great advise in here! I have done two free promotions so far for my book The Malthus Conspiracy http: How do you convert good free downloads to sales??? Hi Danielle, Glad you liked the article. Good numbers on the downloads! This can turn into further sales as well. Thanks for your advice. Any recommendations would be welcome. My website is http: Can you give me any pointers as to the best way to format it through Microsoft word? Also, as I was writing my draft I added a line of dashes to separate each section.

This created one solid black line that I cannot get rid of! Do have any idea how to get rid of this? Oh, the joys of formatting for Kindle! Kindle publishing pro is what you can use. I got it cheap last year. I think my Nook sales are literally 1. Have you tried anything like that? Obviously, you have an active blog community, so that may end up being kind of the same thing! I did release a couple of snippets on the blog — chapter excerpts from time-to-time, and also the table of contents and sample chapter. Definitely worth a shot! However, sales on Smashwords are a small percentage of my amazon.

Hi Tristan, Is this only available for self published authors? It is also available for sale on Barnes and Nobles, and Warren Publishing. I am a bit disappointed with the lack of exposure and only a handful of reviews. Thanking you in advance for your time and advice. Please feel free to visit my website at http: Perhaps this could be a question for your publisher? Maybe there is something else wrong with my book?

Thanks for taking a peek if you have the time. I loved any advise at this point. Do you think I should wait until book two is complete to put in Select? Hello Tristan, Thanks for the great article. We built a small website to help with the promotion, http: We were thinking of handing out bookmarks with a QR code linking to the website. Curious to know how else folks promote kindle books in person.

There are some good other suggestions in the comments on this post — perhaps they can help. This used to be the key, but not anymore, because Amazon changed the weight a free book has in the ranking algorithm. I would be surprised if it worked for a brand new fiction book anymore because though the ratings peak while free, they plummet as soon as the freebie is over, so the follow on sales are virtually non-existent.

There is also a glut of free books so the word free does not have the same pull it once did. Even those who previously established themselves on the back of such promos are seeing less results for their giveways. Apparently you need 5, or more downloads to make it have a follow on effect.

The latest word is that for most people free is dead. Readers are getting savy. Hello — really enjoyed your article, thanks for the advice! Soooooo, I put my book up on Amazon today for free. My downloads as of 8: Holy cow… my question is — really I just need your opinion — Should I keep up with the momentum? I have the free downloads set up until Tuesday… should I stop it? But freaking out a little too. I hope it means sales! Miller-McKinnon Interrogating the Dead: Mayhem and Misery Bay coming soon to Kindle. Brilliant article on how to use the KDP Select programme.

I really do recommend doing promotions but you do need a tool to let the public know. You really can do it! Are Kindle and Amazon one and the same? Amazon is a massive giant, selling almost anything you can think of. The Kindle is a hard-goods product, their e-reader. Real life experience is always the best. I have followed every step of your advice and removed my book from Smashwords and enrolled in KDP select. I will post progress and share my experience if folk are interested. Hi Tristan, Great article. I have 12 ebooks on kindle and this my first KDP select experiment with a free book.

The 5 day period has almost expired with over free. I wait with baited breath to see if people buy when the freeby time expires. Will keep your readers posted. Flat belly secrets at http: Great to hear about that. Very informative and helpful! Good work on the launch. So, if I am to price my e-book at 1. Did I get this right? Hi Ramz — correct. My quick ask is: Hi Richard, Good work on getting it out there! Yes — you can offer it for free, then change the price as needed, through your KDP dashboard.

This is a very helpful article and the benefits of placing your book in Amazon KDP However, you can get a lot more downloads if you submit your book to the book promotion sites that will promote it for free. Here is a good list of them http: How long is the exclusivity period for? Best to check their terms. Thanks for the advice! I enrolled in KDP Select, making my book free for two days. Hi Graeme, Glad you liked the article. I did include one footnote attribution for a name I linked to, and I purchased the front cover image, which gave me a license of up to , copies.

Thanks so much for a wonderful article. I read it just prior to releasing my Kindle book, Nicole Benson. Thanks again for the great info! Keep up the good work and continued success. Another website to promote your book, http: I am impressed at your statistics. I, like a few here, have just put my first book up on Amazon. Being a woman I found it scarier than I could have believed. You say you took 9 months to get to the publish button well how about 30 years?

I know, I know, but my life has been so busy and I was lucky my personal publisher Brian did everything you did and that was why our results are better than we expected. Great reading others like yourself find this a little difficult but exciting too. I think my nest book will go easier now. Thanks for the kind words! Best of luck, Tristan. Great article, my friend took your advice and sold over copies in four days.

Her book is After the storms by Rauzet moustache. Well done and glad you liked the article. Thanks so much for the advice, Tristan! I published my first ebook about three weeks ago and sold about 20 copies. I posted it for free on KDP one day ago and have had nearly downloads thus far! Hi all, Thought I might quickly update on recent experiments using social media to spread awareness about my novel.

All in all, I have had some additional sales, nothing mega. Am more concerned with getting the follow-up novels sorted out otherwise I am going to end up losing my current fan base! It is also a great place to get new ideas and network with fantastic cover artists, editors, promoters, etc. Running the FB group page also tells me how many people have seen my various status updates.

Although only 78 have liked my page, I know that several hundred have seen various updates. There are people on there who are genuinely trying to help other authors with advice and even the opportunity to have their books listed. However, I have found the majority of people are using the forum to promote their novels with frankly underwhelming ads and they wonder why their books are not selling.

They are actually trying to convince other authors to buy their books. Twitter is an excellent way of spreading the word also. The full blog can be read at … http: Cheers again Tristan, Andy Twitter: How long should I wait before offering it on promotion as a free download? Should I offer it free straight away? Grateful for any advice. Your mileage may vary.. Even just for one, day, then split out the other days. Thank you VERY much! Hi Tristan — I was wondering if you know of a way you can give free books on Kindle using a specific one-use coupon.

Best to check with Amazon on that. I have a few Kindle Books on Amazon and am wondering if you know how I can check the numbers that have been downloaded for free on amazon prime? I figure they must be getting downloaded because a couple on my books are in the top in a couple of different categories. Appreciate any insight that you may have on this. I am going to try your advice. I have had my book on Amazon for 2 months and have not tried the free promotion. I used Google Trends to identify the most-searched-for languages, and used that in my keywords.

You could try the same for your niche. Very helpful, I have been worried the free option would canabalise sales but the truth it seems is it only multiplies exponentially exposure and therefore revenue in the long run. Thanks for your wonderful article here, is pretty good. Hi Dav, Nice to see you getting into the publishing game.

You can see this in your Amazon Dashboard under Free Borrows. Thanks Tristan, you are the best. They have not posted any info on my Dashboard. Please, as an experienced personnel in this field; like my eBook appear live on the 27 September, this is October 26; when will it suppose to appear on Dashboard? Fortunately, I followed your advice, before I read your excellent article! I only have book 1 on KDP Select. The idea is to get coverage for that book and, see if that results in sales for books 2 and 3. Does that sound like a reasonable plan? Thanks again for a great article.

I had totally different experience with KDP free promotion. My book was 1 in two categories marriage and divorce during the free promo. As soon as promotion was over my book was kicked down to !!! Can you explain it? Thanks in advance, Nauris. Your article was a great help in steering me in the right direction. After day one I had free downloads and as of now, day 2, I have I have noticed a major slowdown though after a blistering fast start.

I took all of your advice, and as terrified as I am about rejection, I went live on Amazon this morning. As of this morning, my first volume of poetry is available on Amazon for all Kindle formats. A Mustard Seed Of Poetry is available worldwide for all to enjoy. After years of hard work and dedication, my writing has gone that extra mile. Above all else, enjoy. This is great stuff; thanks. I have several books up on Kindle now. Just those 14 days or whatever it is; or during the promotion times? Your answers and comments? Not quite sure on the exclusivity times to be honest.

Best to check with Amazon for that. I am so grateful to you and everyone out there who take the time to give advice and share their experiences with other writers. I put my first book on KDP Select a week and a half ago and have rode a roller coaster of emotions. It was probably the most joyful experience of my life creating my story. I felt happy and in such great spirits as the book took shape. Yet after finishing the writing and editing process, it was time to throw it out to the world and hope it gets caught by others.

I feel encouraged by your strategies and outlook. Plus, the comments I have seen following the article has also made me feel less isolated in my endeavor, and more apart of a large community.


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I now feel connected to others who love to tell stories and write as I do. Again I am thankful for all that take the time to share their struggles and their triumphs. Here is a link to my book for all that are interested. And feedback from any direction is highly valued!!! Hi King, your article came in handy. I just published my book on KDP.

Without promotion I made a sale. Waiting patiently to see what the outcome of the promotions will be. It is on review right now, kindle says. So, I am thinking of giving it a day or two as a chance to stand on its own. Yada yada yada you just want me to tell you how much my Kindle book made in the past year right? What probably sticks out first is just how much the United States and the United Kingdom take up in sales.

But you are not like the younger me are you? You may even buy a cheapo house like me as well right? The internet is always changing and certainly the material in my book will need some degree of on going attention and updating. For this book I joined KDP select which allows me 5 free days to give the book away for free every 90 day period good for promos and to get early reviews. This is an exclusive program which requires you to not publish the book anywhere else other than Amazon. To compensate authors they will pay you when Amazon Prime members borrow your book for free — nifty right?

So what does this tell us? You need to sell 7 times as many books at 99 cents to earn the same money as pricing it at 2. Just a day before I published this post Amazon released a new feature for KDP select members to include a count down timer for your book between price increases. In the past there was some lag between price changes so here you can actually do a price raise perfectly on time.

Amazon is a great partner. They keep making things better for us. The book genuinely completely sucks and they get bad reviews that tank the sales. The book is filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes another source of bad reviews. The cover looks like they opened MS paint and clicked around with the paint brush tool while blindfolded — pay for something sharp. The topic or niche of the book is terrible — seriously the history of hacky sack?

I believe most authors are terrible at marketing which is the primary reason why they fail though. This book is all about buying and selling websites with real life case studies from me. I picked a terrible niche for my 2nd book. To hit the WSJ bestseller list a book needs to sell tens of thousands of copies. Great related article here from James Altucher. One of the best strategies to sell books is to build a platform around your target audience.

This can be done in a number of ways:. Create and scale a website about a specific topic — use this website to promote your book. Build a Facebook page and pay for likes to build your own traffic source — use this page to promote your book. Build an email list based on the traffic you get to your website, Facebook page etc and promote your book that way.

Price your book low for launch to drive extra sales and then increase the price scarcity works. There are a lot of book marketing strategies and tactics that you can employ I could probably write an entire book on that once my Kindle income hits a higher level. I already have a few friends doing thousands per month and I interviewed a guy doing much more than that. So my current plan is to hit 50 books by November 1st Will I write all of these books? Hah of course not. You c my grammer skillz and spellings? I cant right sentences very wel or quik.

I was only able to write 2 books in the past 12 months so at most I can write maybe 4 — 6 marketing related books in the next 12 months. Instead I will be outsourcing all of the book writing, editing and cover creation to other freelancers. I paid someone else to write the content , paid someone else to edit the book and paid someone else to create the cover. What started as a quick blog post to outline some specific numbers of a book I published one year ago turned out to be something much longer. If you enjoyed what you read thank me by purchasing or borrowing one of my books for free.

Click here to buy or borrow one of my books. Want to follow along with my case study? Feedback welcomed in the comments…. Let me know if I tricked you. Chris, thanks for this detailed post. I have a fb page for one of them, but looks like I need to do some of the marketing you explained here.

I have a third one to launch so will re-read this post before I do. I have an email list of about 10, in my other non marketing niche. I am one of your subscribers and really enjoyed this helpful article. I had a question regarding this outsourcing model. Can you tell me how you research the topics and how much it would cost to outsource a book of around 70 to pages. In the case of the 3 I had outsourced so far I simply paid the writer that I had been paying to write content for my related website to start writing the Kindle books.

How to Increase Your Amazon Kindle Book Sales by 600% in a Week

So the upfront work I had already invested to find a great writer for the site allowed me to have her keep on working in a different area for me. Elance is where I found my editor and a friend of mine referred me to that editor. Thank you for sharing Chris. What i didnt realise is that you can actually make quite a decent money from selling ebooks. Can you tell us about how are you going to select your niche for your 50 ebooks? How do you know what niche will sell? I enjoyed your Amazon book but the only thing i did not like was that it was not in PDF form and it was a pain to read in kindle.

I know you probably make more money selling on it Amazon but it would have been nice if i could have gotten it in a PDF also. The upsides make it worth it to not be able to sell outside the market though. Thanks Chris,I always enjoying your information. Here is my question on kindle,what type of niche sell very well on kindle? Is it compulsory to use pen name when creating ebook on different niches?. Hey Anthony, this is the second question about niche selection. It deserves a whole post but ultimately I target niches where I see books are already selling.

Kindle Marketing Secrets - 3 Easy Ways To Promote Your Kindle Book And Get More Sales

With a pen name I can set up a website tied to that specific author, twitter account etc rather than having them all under one account. Have you tested this at all?


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Might be worth trying in the future? Will be sure to update this via a future case study post as I plan to do several more posts about Kindle marketing. Would you be interested in outsourcing the writing job of one of the books to me? I have been blogging for a around 5 years now. And I have also written a ebook.