Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
There are a large number of different online methods for making money but publishing books to Kindle is one of the most under-utilized and potentially profitable.In fact, making money from Kindle is probably one of the best ways to live the ‘passive income’ dream shared by so many marketers. This is an opportunity to make money while you’re sleeping, while you’re on holiday, or while you’re busy with other tasks.
And it’s a chance to sell to a huge audience that includes everyone from the tech savvy marketers you’re used to selling to, to silver-surfers, stay-at-home Mums, students and everyone in between. In 2010, Amazon announced that e-book sales had surpassed paperback sales on Amazon, which should tell you just what a gigantic market you have to tap into here. This is a far cry from selling a ‘make money’ ebook via a sales page on your website, which will only appeal to a relatively very small audience.
How much profit can you make? It’s massive. Some people are making several hundred thousand
dollars a year from Kindle and once they’ve set that business up, they don’t have to do anything much to maintain it. Selling books on Kindle also makes a fantastic ‘side business’. It’s a brilliant way to diversify and to give yourself an additional income stream and it’s also a great way to make your business more resilient in the face of market changes. You can re-use old materials this way and even use it to promote your other websites, products and other businesses.
Oh and guess what else? It’s actually really easy and incredibly scalable. Unlike creating mobile apps or websites, you don’t need any particular skills (other than the basic ability to write though that’s negotiable too) and you can have an ebook up and running and for sale on the marketplace in a matter hours.
BUT there are of course caveats. Making money on Kindle isn’t easy if you don’t know what you’re
doing. It’s a very saturated marketplace with 4.3 million ebooks available in the US right now, and there are several irritating catches (like the high commission that Amazon charges) that you need to be aware of.
And guess what? You’ve got one!
In this book, you will learn:
How the Kindle ecosystem works and how to thrive in it
How to create and publish your own books
How to promote your ebooks
How to handle reviews
How to use basic ‘SEO’ to make your books easily discoverable
How to price and package your books for optimum sales
How to create ebooks quickly – even if you don’t know how to write
How to ‘future proof’ your business against future changes
How to diversify and appear on other ereaders
Even if you don’t have any prior experience making money online, running a blog or creating content, you’ll be able to create something quickly and easily and have your own book getting downloads and making money on Kindle within days.
To begin with you might make a few dollars a week but if you follow the advice in the rest of this book, you could potentially be earning thousands in no time!
And the really exciting thing? That will make you a professional author and publisher!
Are you ready to dive into the world of Kindle publishing?
To that end, Kindle began life as a hardware device from Amazon – though it has grown beyond that now.
Can
You Profit From a Fiction Book on Kindle?
Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
If you’re writing for Kindle as a marketer
hoping to make money online, then the chances are that you will be thinking
predominantly in terms of non-fiction. The assumption is that it’s easier to
market and easier to sell something that serves a particular purpose or answers
a particular question.
So for example, people will very often
search for things like ‘how to create wooden furniture’ or ‘how to make money
online’ because they are things they want to learn. This makes them willing to
pay (especially if they think they’ll earn money as a result) and it makes your
book easier for the right people to find.
But what if you want to write fiction?
Writing fiction is certainly arguably more fun
than writing non-fiction but how would you go about marketing it?
How
to Sell Fiction
The thing to recognize is that when you
write fiction, people aren’t going to be searching for it because they won’t
know what it is. Call your book ‘Quest of the Giant Mammoths’ and no one is
going to think to look for it.
There are some ways you can get around this
limitation though. One is to make sure that your book includes terms that
people will search, or that it
tackles a subject matter that appeals to a specific group.
A good example of this might be to write
about transhumanism. Transhumanism is a topic that deals with people enhancing
their bodies through technology and there are many forums on the web discussing
this movement. Write speculative fiction on this subject and you will then not
only be more likely to get found by readers but you will also have ‘routes to
market’ – specific places where you can promote yourself.
Likewise, you can get your book to stand
out by making it a sequel to a well-known book or the next book in a franchise.
This can create copyright issues though, so the only way to do this legally is
to choose characters in the public domain. For example, Sherlock Holmes is in
the public domain as the author Arthur Conan Doyle passed away long ago. You
can likewise write about historical characters (King Arthur), legends (Robin
Hood) or even religious figures (Thor).
Standing
Out
Another strategy is to go the opposite way
and try to make your book so unique and so interesting that it stands out. How
about writing with a unique writing style for example? Creating a unique format
for your book like Cloud Atlas? Or
writing on a subject that people don’t normally touch? If you do this and you
do it well, you can potentially create a buzz and this can help do the marketing
for you.
At any rate though, you will need to be
creative if you’re going to sell a fictional title and it will almost always be
more of a challenge than selling non-fiction.
But if it’s what you love, then perhaps
making lots of money isn’t the biggest concern for you?
How
to Add Polish to Your Kindle Book
Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
When you sell a Kindle book, it will be
much more than just the topic and writing style that dictates its success. Also
integral to your success will be the length of the book, the way it is
presented and the marketing.
And here, presentation is far more
important than most people realize. The right presentation will make your book
look that much more professional and be that much more appealing to look at. It
will instantly make it feel like a more premium product and will give more
weight to whatever it is you’re saying. This colors the first impressions that
your audience will have and it has a drastic impact on how likely your audience
is to buy the full book once they’ve read the introduction.
So how do you add that kind of polish and
finesse that will really sell your title? Let’s take a look…
Images
One thing that can make a big difference to
the success of your book is the inclusion of any images. If you include crisp,
dynamic and professional looking photos in your book then it will make the page
much more appealing to look at and it will help you to highlight and illustrate
whatever it is that you’re saying. The important thing to recognize with your
choice of imagery is that Kindle books are normally presented in black and
white (though not always any more). This means that you will need to ensure
that your photos can look good in color or
black and white and to do that, you need to make sure they are well lit and
full of contrast.
There are several different ways you can
get hold of the images you want to use. Either you can take the photos
yourself, or you can buy stock photos. You can also acquire stock imagery that
has no copyright restrictions and this way you can get images quickly and free.
Headings
and Paragraphs
Also important is to split your book up
into lots of sections. This will help to prevent it from looking like a single
‘wall of text’ on every page and will make it that much more approachable and
readable as a result. At the same time, using large headings can help to draw
attention to certain parts of the book and give it a more professional appeal.
Fortunately, you can use Word’s built in
formatting options to apply this very easily. Use the Home tab and select
‘Styles’ to use different sized headers. This then also allows you to easily
implement a range of other formatting tricks – the References tab for instance
houses the ability to implement a menu based on the headers you’ve used, while
you can use Design to change the entire layout and style of the book.
Likewise, you can use Insert to add page
numbers and headers.
If you do all this and include great
looking images at the same time, then your book will look professional and have
a sheen that helps it to sell and that delivers more value to your readers.
How
to Get Good Reviews for Your Kindle Book
Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
Reviews are very important on Kindle. Of
course a good or bad rating can have a big impact when it comes to influencing
the buying decisions of your readers – most of us are considerably more likely
to buy a book if we think it sounds good according to the previous buyers.
Likewise, if a book is often described negatively then we will often be put
off.
Actually though, this isn’t the biggest way
that a review impacts sales. Ultimately, most of us will at least read the free
sample of a book on Kindle if we are sufficiently interested in the topic. The
bigger problem then, is that reviews can impact rankings. If your book has bad
reviews, then it won’t rank as highly on the Kindle Store and this will mean
that far fewer people are able to discover it and thus spend money on it.
So the question becomes: how do you ensure
you get the best reviews? Let’s take a look…
Write
a Great Book
This should go without saying but it’s
incredibly important to write a good book if you want to get the best reviews.
This means that the writing style should be on-point with good use of language,
correct spelling and good grammar.
Likewise though, it also means that the
book should be interesting, unique and engaging. It needs to provide some kind
of value and that means that you need to provide some kind of takeaway for the
reader.
Write
an Accurate Description
In a bid to make the most sales possible on
their books, a lot of marketers and writers will write a highly persuasive and
sales-y description for their books. The aim here is to make people want to
read the book and to thereby over-sell it.
While this can help to give you an initial
surge in sales though, it can also end up hurting you if what’s in the book
doesn’t live up to the hype. Make sure your description is accurate and that
you don’t give away all the surprises inside. You want your readers to come
away pleasantly surprised and not disappointed when they’ve finished the book.
Charge
Correctly
Ultimately, a review should tell people if
a book is good value or not. And the best way to make a book good value is to
decrease the price – thereby meaning that the readers get more for less.
Actually, one of the very best things you
can do for your book in terms of ranking is to lower the price for a while to
drive sales and to increase the number of positive reviews.
Respond
Another tip is to respond to your negative
reviews. Don’t be defensive or aggressive and respect your readers’ right to
their opinion. At the same time though, you should be sure that you respond in
order to apologise and to explain your point of view – you can even offer a
refund.
This not only shows that you offer good
customer service (thereby taking some of the sting out of a bad review) but if
you’re lucky they may even change their rating once they feel heard!
How
to Take Stunning Pictures for Your Kindle Book
Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
Pictures can add a great deal to a Kindle
title and really help it to sell. Not only is the cover one of the most
important features when it comes to grabbing attention and drawing people in
but the images inside the book will also help to illustrate your points and
also make the pages pop more. This is only even more true now that the Kindle
Fire and other full color tablets are becoming more popular as many users’
preferred reading devices.
But the question is: how do you take great
quality pictures for your book? It’s not enough just to add images: they need
to look fantastic if they’re going to help you sell. Of course you can use free
stock images or you can buy images – but this will pale in comparison to the
benefits that come from creating custom images that perfectly illustrate what
the text is saying and that your readers aren’t going to accidentally find
anywhere else!
So here’s how you do it…
Invest
in a Good Camera
A good starting point is to invest in a
high quality camera. This should have a decent number of mega pixels and should
also have a good lens and lots of features. A DSLR can help you to pull off
more impressive and stylistic effects but it’s not necessary if you want to
save money or you’re not sure about learning all the different settings. A
bridge camera is a camera that is much cheaper and that offers a good
‘half-way’ point between a DSLR and a decent superzoom.
Think
About Lighting
When you take your photo, it’s not just
enough to think about the object itself. At the same time, you also need to
think about the lighting which will have a big impact on how it appears. Avoid
having glare (unless it’s intentional) and make sure the subject of the photo
is well lit. Ideally, try to have light hitting the object from the side.
And
Composition
Also important is to compose your shot.
This means thinking about the foreground, middle ground and background. It also
means deciding where you want your subject to be among these elements and how
you’re going to lead the eye from one to the other. Having an object out of
focus in the foreground, or putting your subject to the left of center can make
for a more interesting shot than just taking photos of everything head on.
Tell
a Story
Perhaps most important of all is that your
photos tell a story. That is to say that it’s not good enough for your photos
to simply be of something: you need
to make sure that they express emotion or suggest what has just happened or
what is just about to happen.
Instead of taking a photo of a party for
instance, you could take a photo of a glass that’s empty with lipstick marks
around the top. This creates much more intrigue because it gets the user to
think – which in turn increases engagement for your book.
How
to Write a Book That Engages and Grips
Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
If you’re going to make money from Kindle,
then you’re going to have to do some writing. Specifically, you’re going to
have to write some books and these are going to need to be engaging both in
terms of their title and concept and in
terms of their writing and style. Many marketers make the mistake of thinking
that it’s okay to release a sub-par book as long as it has a great title. Their
logic is that a book with a good enough title and subject will sell and at that
point it will be too late for the buyer to change their mind…
Apart from this being immoral, it also just
plain doesn’t work. The problem with this approach is that selling an poorly
written ebook will result in bad reviews (which will hurt subsequent sales of
course) and a lot of people only reading the free sample and not investing in
the whole book. It will also hurt your long-term profitability.
So how do you go about writing a book that
will be so stellar that it sells by word-of-mouth? Let’s take a look at some
strategies.
Writing
Style
One thing that is of course important is
your writing style. Good writing should be engaging and entertaining and should
also be grammatically correct (and properly spelled). While poor spelling
shouldn’t impact on the message you’re getting across, it will nevertheless
damage your reputation and make you less trustworthy to your readers – which in
turn will detract from your readers’ enjoyment.
Make sure your writing style is good enough
to charge money and if it’s not… hire someone!
Formatting
Again, formatting shouldn’t really make a
difference to the actual value and entertainment your book offers. But what it
does do is to color the first impression your book makes on readers and to make
it look that much more professional and that much more impressive. So be sure
to use proper headings, great images and more to give your books a truly
professional format.
Structure
and Pacing
Also important is your pacing. This means
you need to draw the reader in and make sure to keep delivering value to them.
Try to think about your paragraphs and your chapters like instalments in a
television series – ending on a cliff hanger will make sure that your readers
can’t wait to turn to the next page. What’s more though, the next chapter then
needs to deliver on the promise of that cliff hanger and not be an anti-climax!
Value
The most important thing of all is that
your book offer value. If it’s non-fiction, then this means you need to provide
useable information that can help your readers to achieve more. If your book is
a story, then the value comes from the entertainment factor and you need to
ensure your story really moves your reader.
Think too about ‘over delivering’. In other
words, if you can offer more value than you suggest in the blurb, then your
customers will feel they got a great deal!
How
to Write Effectively and Correctly
Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
If you’re going to make money from a book,
then it needs to have a clear, concise and accurate writing style. You could
have the very best premise and the very most valuable information in the world
– but if you have a poor writing style that sounds amateurish then most people
won’t get past the first few lines and you’re going to get bad reviews.
So the question then becomes: can you learn to be a good writer? And if so,
how? Some people will argue that good writing is actually something you either
‘have or don’t have’ but it’s certainly true that at least learning some basic
concepts can help a great deal. Let’s take a look…
The
Objective of Writing
What exactly is ‘good writing’? While there
are many answers, the one underlying truth is that good writing needs to
communicate. That means that your audience needs to understand what you’re
saying and get your point.
And it also follows that good writing
should be efficient. So that means your aim is to convey the most information
in the fewest possible words. By doing this, you give your reader the
information that they’re looking for in the quickest possible time, thereby
essentially offering the most value and saving the most time and space!
Writing
Should be Fun to Read
If also follows that writing should be
enjoyable to read and easy. You want people to not only get the information
you’re trying to put across but also to enjoy the process of getting it. If
your text is very dense or if you use a lot of indecipherable jargon, then you
will put people off and this is not effective
writing! Writing is certainly not about showing off how many words you know.
Writing should flow off the tongue and it
should sound great when read aloud.
Vocabulary
With that in mind then, why do people use
‘big words’ at all? Why not rely on the same few words to efficiently convey
meaning?
The answer is simply that vocabulary allows
you to put across more specific meaning. There are subtle differences between
words that look like synonyms on the face of it and some words will flow better
in a sentence than others. Therefore, using a range of different words can add
color, emotion and drama to your writing which you couldn’t put across with
just a few basic words.
Tone
For the vast majority of books on the
Kindle store a ‘conversational’ tone will be the most appropriate. These are
books aimed at a commercial audience who want to be entertained and perhaps
learn something.
But when you’re writing a B2B book on
finance, then you need to adopt a more serious and formal tone. This is another
reason why a good vocabulary is a most: it allows you to work within any niche
and still sound appropriate. Make sure that the tone and style of your book is
fitting for the audience and the subject matter and this will ensure it is
better received.
More
Ways to Sell Your Ebook
Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
If you’ve gone to great lengths to create a
Kindle book, then you need to make sure that you absolutely maximize the profit
you’re going to get from that and that you promote it through as many channels
as possible.
This is why it’s important to recognize
that a Kindle book doesn’t just have
to be sold on the Kindle Store. Once you’ve created your PDF or Doc file,
you’re free to distribute it in many different ways as long as you’re not part
of the Kindle Select program.
This is actually one of the big benefits of
selling an ebook because it means you can re-use content – which isn’t the case
when you write content for a website (due to Google’s policies toward duplicate
content).
So what else can you do to get your ebook
out there for all to see? Here are some good options…
Self-Publish
One option is to self-publish your ebook.
Once upon a time this was a bad idea because it meant using ‘vanity publishing’
which in turn meant spending a lot of money to invest in thousands of copies of
your own book. Today better means exist thanks to something called ‘Print On
Demand’ publishing.
Essentially, POD means that you create a
file and then only pay for that file to be printed. This means you’re paying
for the printing costs and not for the books themselves and it means you don’t
have anything to lose. If no one orders a book, there is no cost to you.
Self-publishing is possible through Luu and also through Amazon.
Sell
From Your Website
Something else you can do is to sell the
book as a PDF from your own website. You could do this by adding an ecommerce
store to a WordPress site for example but you can also do it by adding a PayPal
‘Buy Now’ button or using something like OptimizePress.
Either way, this means you’re no longer splitting
the profits with Amazon but it does mean that you’re vulnerable to pirating and
it means that you won’t have access to the large audience that you get through
the Kindle Store.
Another positive of selling from your own
site though is that you can use affiliate programs. This means that you offer
commission to marketers who can help you sell your book. While this means
splitting the profit once again, it also means that you’ll have a legion of
people helping you to sell and that in turn means you’ll sell countless copies
that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
Trying
Other Stores
There are also other stores you can sell
through. These include the Barnes and Noble store which lets you sell on the
Nook, Google Play Books, iTunes and more. Again, you don’t have to do this instead of selling on Amazon – you can
do it in addition and earn even more profit.
Repurposing
Your Content
You can also repurpose your content and use
it in other ways: as posts on your blog for example or even as part of a mobile
app!
SEO
Basics for Kindle
SEO is ‘Search Engine Optimization’. This
is the process of editing a website and building links in such a way that it
will be optimized for Google. This means building links (which helps Google to
find a site and is viewed as testimony) and it means ensuring the correct use
of keywords on the pages.
When done correctly, SEO can drive a lot
more traffic to a website by helping more visitors find it through Google.
But SEO isn’t just for websites and it
isn’t just for Google. There are many more search engines out there and many of
them we don’t necessarily think of as ‘search engines’. Of course you can
probably guess where this is going: the Kindle store is also a search engine.
In order to find books on Kindle, customers will need to search for the relevant
topics and then sift through the top results. This means you can still perform
SEO for a Kindle book, in order to increase your exposure through that search
tool and thereby to help more customers find you.
And in some ways, this is just the same as
SEO for a website. In other ways, it’s completely different…
Your
Listing
The first way you can increase your
exposure in the Kindle Store is to make sure your listing is on-point. The
biggest factors here will be the title you choose for your book as this is
going to directly impact on what searches bring people to your page. Of course
one strategy is to make your title the same as your ‘keyword’ (the search term
you want to rank for). For example, you might call it: ‘How to Lose Weight With
Bodyweight Training’.
While this might work, it can unfortunately
undermine the effectiveness of your title by being too ‘obvious’. Only include
keywords in your title then where it is a natural fit and where it doesn’t hurt
your brand.
Where you can include a few more keywords is in the description for your
book. Don’t be too obvious though – instead just write enough that relevant
words will naturally be included so that Amazon knows what your book is about.
Success
On Kindle, success begets success. In other
words, the more downloads you receive and the better your reviews, the higher
you will rank. This of course then leads to more
downloads and more reviews creating a virtuous cycle.
Your job as a marketer is to make sure that
you get that ball rolling. And one way to do that is to run a promotion. If you
sell your book for less, then this can drive more downloads and also encourage
more positive reviews from happy customers.
An even better way to do this is through
Amazon’s ‘Kindle Select’ program. While there are some downsides to being a
part of this program, it does mean that you’ll be considered for special
promotions which might even result in your book being on the front page. This
is a great way to give yourself that boost and certainly worth considering.
The
Top Niches for Your Kindle Book
Making money from Kindle is in many ways
just like making money from any other digital product. This is a form of
internet marketing just like the rest and that means you’re going to need to
some marketing.
In turn, this means you need to think very
carefully when choosing various elements of your book. It is not enough to
write a great book and market it well: you need to ensure that the book you’ve
created also has a clear audience that you’ll be able to market to.
This latter point is actually potentially
the most important factor of all when it comes to profiting from an ebook. It’s
not enough to write your book and then decide
how you’re going to sell it: instead you need to have a clear plan for how to
sell the book and who will buy it at the point when you come up with the
concept.
And this means picking the right niche…
Market
Size and Value Proposition
There are two key things to consider here.
One is the market size: people will generally want to gravitate toward larger
markets at first because they will presume that this creates more potential to
sell. This is why there are so many books on Kindle about fitness, about dating
and about making money.
The other reason these topics are popular
is that they have a clear ‘value proposition’. A value proposition is basically
the value that you promise your readers will get from your book: not just in
terms of enjoyment but in terms of the way it will improve their lives. A ‘make
money’ book offers a lot of value because it promises to make the reader richer:
in that case it is actually an investment when they spend money on your book.
While fitness books aren’t an investment as such meanwhile, the insinuation is
that readers will become healthier, more attractive to the opposite sex and
more athletic. In both cases, people are willing to spend a lot of money and
much more money than they would spend
simply to be entertained, or to learn about knitting for example.
Competition
But then you have a new problem: these
topics are so popular among readers
and writers alike that the markets are saturated. If you write a book on
fitness for Kindle, you will be competing with hundreds of thousands of other
titles and this will make it incredibly difficult for you to stand out.
Conversely, if you make an ebook on a much
more niche topic then you’ll face a lot less competition. The only problem? No
one will be looking for it and you won’t have as many people you can
potentially sell to.
So what is the solution? Simple: to find a
‘sub-niche’. That means finding a smaller niche within a bigger one. So choose
fitness - which has that broad appeal and that value proposition – but then
target older readers, or perhaps a particular type of training such as
elliptical training.
Top
Reasons to Sell on Kindle – Is This the Ideal Business Model?
Make Money From Kindle Ebook Free PDF Download
If you’re looking for ways to make money
online, then it pays to think a little outside the box. Too often we focus only
on building websites, on affiliate marketing or on selling services. But in
fact there are countless other options, whether that means building an app for
Android, or it means creating an ebook.
And creating an ebook to sell on Kindle
might just be that perfect business
model you’re looking for. Read on and we’ll look at some of the ways in which
this is an ideal way to make money online…
It’s
Easy
Selling an ebook on Kindle is a business
model that literally anyone can emulate. As long as you can write and you have
a copy of Word (even that is somewhat optional) then you can create a book and
upload it to the Kindle Store. There’s no fee for becoming a publisher and it
can all be done in an evening. The only hard bit is writing the book – but you
can easily outsource this or purchase the rights to a digital product if you
prefer.
It’s
Efficient
Selling on Kindle is also efficient in as
much as you can re-use old content and recycle your products. For example, once
you’ve created an ebook for Kindle, there’s no reason that you can’t also sell it on Nook, on the Google Play
Bookstore or on iTunes. You can also create a PDF and simply sell it from your
own website.
There’s also no reason that you can’t
create entire series of books reusing certain elements of your content.
It’s
Truly Passive
Making money online is a truly passive form
of income. In other words, once you’ve uploaded your book to the Kindle Store,
you’ll be able to continue making sales without having to do anything else to
promote it. People will find it on the Store by searching and even if the book
isn’t a hit, you can still find that this provides an additional source of
revenue as occasional sales trickle in.
There are many online business models that
claim to be passive but almost all of them require some form of maintenance or
ongoing promotion. Selling books on Kindle is truly 100% passive!
It’s
Scalable
The fact that you aren’t trading time for
money when you sell Kindle books means that it is truly scalable. In other
words, you can take your effective business model and repeat it over and over
again to drastically increase your sales.
So you’ve made money from selling one book.
What’s to stop you from create another book and selling that too? And then
another and another?
Even if all these books only make you $10 a
week – once you’re selling 100 of them, that’s then $1,000 a week!
More likely though, what you’ll find is
that most of your books don’t make that much money at all – perhaps they make
you $1 a week if you’re lucky. But then you’ll have one breakout hit that
drives sales for all the others up and that drastically increases your salary.
This is a game of numbers and if you play long enough, eventually success is
inevitable!
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