Let's talk about how to quickly create a book that will generate passive income for months. Marketers that aren’t looking into Kindle are sorely missing out on one of the very best means to generate income currently available online.
Kindle of course is Amazon’s e-reader and this includes a large number of different devices as well as apps. Using an Amazon account, users can buy Kindle ebooks and then read them either on their ereaders or on their phones and tablets using the mobile app.
The Low-Risk Business Model
What’s so great about this from the perspective of a seller, is that Amazon has managed to make ebooks into something with a huge appeal and have successfully marketed them to a massive audience. Amazon announced a while back that their Kindle ebook sales had been outperform their sales of physical months for years and on any commute or at any hotel, you’ll see plenty of evidence for the popularity of the devices.
If you’ve been in the internet marketing game for a while, then no doubt you’ve sold ebooks before. But chances are that those books will have had titles like: ‘Marketing Mastery: How to Use SEO and PPC in the Modern Age’ and will have sold for $35 via a sales page.
This is the business model that many of us rely on because it lets us make nearly 100% profit from all our sales. There is no overhead with a digital product such as an ebook, no delivery cost and no storage. You can simply let your users download your books and profit each time they do.
Only a very specific type of person buys these ebooks though. While it might be a bit of a stereotype, you’d likely have a hard time selling this type of book to someone’s Grandma. What’s more is that people don’t like reading PDFs on their computers or their tablets, they don’t like buying from strangers on the internet and PDFs are all too easy to share and acquire without paying.
But Amazon has solved all these issues and destroyed all these barriers. Everyone knows and trusts Amazon as a company and that removes the sense of risk when buying products online.
Most people have already given Amazon their payment details, which means they can buy with a single click.
And on top of all this, Kindle provides a convenient, user friendly and comfortable way to read ebooks and makes it very hard for them to be shared without permission.
In other words, selling your ebooks on Kindle means you have access to a far more sprawling potential user base and simultaneously provides a platform that helps that massive audience find your books and buy them.
In fact, you hardly even need to do any marketing – if your book uses the right keywords, then it will get found simply by being on Kindle for people to discover when they’re searching for the right topics.
In short, you can upload a book on any subject (not just internet marketing) and sell it to everyone from Grandmas, to commuters, to travellers, to students, to parents… you name it!
Best of all is just how easy this all is. You can upload a book to Kindle in HTML or Doc format completely for free and it will be available to buy in no time at all. You can then start generating passive income from that point forward with no need to anything. If you already have content sitting around on your computer that isn’t being fully utilized, then why not upload it and start profiting from it big time?
The worst case scenario is that you upload some books and you make a few extra dollars a week and give yourself another source of revenue and some more exposure for your brand. But the best case scenario? You could have a hit on your hands that leads to thousands or even millions of downloads and that funds your lifestyle for the next ten years.
There’s a huge amount to gain and absolutely nothing to lose.
Success Depending on How You Do It
But just as selling on Kindle gives you numerous unique advantages, you also need to approach it in a unique manner. This is a whole different ball game compared with the kind of internet marketing you’re probably familiar with. Sales pages are no longer an issue, PPC is going to play a much smaller role, affiliate sales aren’t a thing… and your audience is now entirely different.
So the question is: how do you write a Kindle book that’s going to be successful? How do you market it?
That’s what we’ll touch on briefly here and in much more detail in the full ebook.
For now though, you need to understand how to choose a niche and how to choose an audience at the same time.
In many ways, this is very similar to choosing a blog topic if you’re familiar with SEO. In fact, you can basically think of Kindle as being a search engine just like Google. When Kindle users are looking for a new book to read, they’ll head to the search box and they’ll type in the subject they want. If they’re looking for dating advice for instance, then they might type:
‘Dating book’
Or perhaps they want a guide to electronic engineering, in which case they’ll search for:
‘Electronic engineering guide’
As on Google, your aim as a marketer is to ensure that your content is what gets served up in response to these searches. And the simplest way to do that to begin with is to make sure your book is on the right topic.
As with Google again, you are going to be facing a lot of competition. So if you choose to make an ebook all about losing weight, you’re going to be competing with about 100,000,000 other books to try and get to the top spot. Some of these books are going to be absolute classics, written by leading experts and published by large companies with millions of dollars to spend on marketing. In other words? It’s not going to happen unless people already know about your name or you’ve effectively promoted the title of your tome.
On the other hand though, if you make your book about something too niche – like arctic fishing – then there are only so many people who will be interested in buying your book.
Your objective is to find a topic that has a large number of interested readers but not a huge amount of competition. The good news? It’s still a lot easier to do this on Kindle than it is to do this on Google.
So what makes a good niche?
Actually, one of the very best options is to make a book on a career. This is going to work especially well if it’s your own job, in which case you should have a good amount of knowledge and experience to bring to the writing and you may even have some useful contacts that you can use to promote your book and to gain exposure.
But what really makes something like a career or industry such a good option is that it is a very specific niche that will nevertheless provide a very useful purpose to a large number of people. There won’t be too much competition and you’ll be able to identify and solve a specific problem for a specific type of person.
A great example might be something like running a food truck, stage lighting, personal training or art law. It’s niche but not too niche and it provides you with very clear and direct ‘routes to market’ (a route to market being a place where you will be able to directly address your audience). For example, if you’re writing about stage lighting, then you could promote your book to an industry magazine.
On the other hand, you can also try focusing on a smaller aspect of a larger niche. For example, if you wanted to go the fitness route, then you could hone in on a much more specific area of fitness. For example, how about writing a guide to using a particular type of exercise equipment? You could even potentially arrange some kind of deal with the manufacturers of that equipment or the Amazon sellers and get some free promotion that way!
Another option might be to write a training book for a specific type of sport, or a guide to working out for
Likewise, instead of writing a book on app development (there are thousands of those books), how about writing about app development for a specific type of reader App development for web designers for instance, or ’Creating an App for Your Restaurant Business’.
Factors to Increase Your Sales
If you’re someone who knows anything about SEO, then you might already be beginning to see how all this will work. You’ll select your topic or niche, then you’ll make a book with exactly that title, right?
So if you want to write a book telling people how to ‘Lose Man Boobs’ then you’ll call your book ‘Lose Man Boobs’ or ‘How to Lose Man Boobs’.
And then you get to number one for that niche… right?
Well, yes and no. For starters, there are many more factors that Kindle will take into account when ranking titles – many of which we’ll be looking at later in this report (and more in the book). At the same time, SEO for Kindle is also a little more complex and delicate, just as SEO for Google is.
For starters, you need to think carefully about the title of your book because this is also something that is going to be very appealing for your audience and that should encourage people to click and learn more. If you just go for a straight keyword or keyphrase, then you might find that this leads to not many people caring what your book is about or taking the time to learn more.
For example, if you have a book about foraging for mushrooms and you call it:
‘Foraging for Mushrooms’
This may be less successful than one called:
‘How to Live off the Land and Create Delicious Meals for Free’
The solution? Combine the two:
‘Foraging for Mushrooms: How to Live off the Land and Create Delicious Meals for Free’
Now you have a keyword and something very interesting that your readers might want to learn more about.
At the same time, you also need to do the same for your book description. In other words, make sure that you are using your keywords occasionally in the text but not so much as to draw attention to it (which could lead to your book being penalized) and not so much as to negatively impact on the readability of your description – which is one of the places where you’ll be able to encourage your reader to buy.
For those who are familiar with digital marketing, this description is the closest thing you have to a sales page and it’s where you’re going to convince people to buy your book. Focus on the value proposition then – think about what it is that your book can do to make life better for your readers and how that will feel on an emotional level once you’ve done it.
So if you have a book on fitness, your value proposition doesn’t lie in the word count or even in the fact that the reader will get fit. This is all about the way they’ll feel once they’ve read your book and followed the instructions – they’ll be healthier, they’ll have more energy and they’ll be stronger. They’ll feel more confident too. Talk about that in your introduction while occasionally including your keyphrase and you should manage to convince both Amazon and your readers to take notice.
Getting The Cover Right
There are other factors too that will impact on the success of your book that just wouldn’t play a role in traditional SEO. For example: the cover of your book.
Think about how you browse for books in a library or when reading on Kindle. Chances are that you’ll browse through the covers and titles and look for something that stands out. Once you’ve seen something you’re interested in, you’ll then read the back and perhaps flick through a few pages at the front of the book (if you’re in a physical store). So the cover is one of the most important elements when it comes to getting that initial attention.
And what you also need to think about here is that actual Kindle devices (that most people still read these books on) have black and white e-ink displays. This means you need to make sure that your book cover will look fantastic in black and white – which in turn means you need to use a high contrast image.
One of your most valuable tools when it comes to selling your books is to try and be different, unique and unusual. People are fed up with reading the same thing – and especially considering how long it takes to read a book thoroughly.
If you want your book to stand out, then try to use curiosity to your advantage and find a way to be different and interesting. This is especially interesting if you’re writing in a crowded niche.
Think about it: if you see a book titled: ‘100 Easy Knitting Patterns’ then it’s not exactly going to leap out. But how about ‘Naked Knitting: Knitting Just Got Sexy’ with a picture of someone knitting while on top of a mountain. This is different, bold and interesting – and it might just be enough to encourage people to look at your book’s listing and then potentially to be persuaded by your description of how ‘this changes knitting!’.
The Excerpt
Another factor that is very unique to promoting a book on Kindle is the fact that you have the option to read a free sample of any book you like the looks of. That means that most people aren’t going to take your word for it when they read your description – instead they’ll consider downloading the first few pages of your book to see if it really is as good as you promise and as the cover makes it look.
This means a few things. For starters, it means that your book needs to be good. You can’t get by with a great cover and hope it’s ‘too late’ once people have already bought it. You need to write well and you need to be engaging and different enough to warrant a full read-through.
How do you do this?
One important tip early on is to consider using a narrative structure. Narrative structures are highly effective when it comes to getting people to read on, because we are naturally inclined to want to find out what happens in stories and to keep reading on. So even if you are writing a non-fiction book, try to tell it like a story and to get your reader to invest in what you’re saying emotionally so they want to know what’s going to happen.
At the same time, you also need to make sure that you demonstrate your ability to provide value early on. This means that right in those first few pages you need to provide some kind of takeaway tip, idea or strategy that your reader can use and that will really benefit them. Do this while also teasing that a lot more interesting and exciting content is further inside the book.
It’s a mistake to hold everything back only for paying customers, as people don’t like to be toyed with and they like to see that you can really deliver on what you’re promising.
Marketing Your Book
If you do all of this well, then your book will begin to sell with no additional marketing on your part. The reach and influence of Amazon is such that this alone should mean people start to find you and you begin making sales.
But this is not to say that there aren’t a lot of things you can do as well to encourage even more sales and even more profits.
For starters, recognize that your listing will be dictated to a large extent by the number of sales you make and your reviews. So if you get a lot of buyers and they are leaving good reviews, then this will lead to a ‘virtuous cycle’ and a self-sustaining momentum whereby the more sales you generate, the more you make in future.
This is why it’s such a good idea to run promotions and discounts for your books. Even if you’re selling for very little profit to begin with, this will still help you to generate more sales and more profits in future which makes this a powerfully effective ‘loss leader’.
Likewise, you should consider entering your book into programs like Kindle Select. It’s important you think hard about this though, as it will impact on other factors such as your ability to sell your book elsewhere (such as by self publishing through LuLu) and will mean you make a lower profit for each sale.
In the full ebook, we look at all these factors in detail to help you identify what the best way to proceed is for you.
Likewise, you can also give your sales a ‘push’ by using more traditional forms of marketing like PPC, SEO or advertising in magazines and other forms of media. Again, we discuss all of this and go into some detailed strategies in the full ebook.
Respond to reviews, request that people leave good reviews if they enjoyed your book and keep working on your titles to improve them so that your rating will only improve with time.
Once you’ve got a book that is generating a lot of profit, you can simply ‘rinse and repeat’. Now, the very fact that you had one successful book will help your next title to take off much faster.
This is an infinitely scalable business and that makes it all the more easy to generate huge profits. To learn MUCH more about how you can make this work for you, check out Make Money From Kindle. Here, you’ll also learn how to actually create your ebooks, how to format them and how to outsource some of the work to save time. All this will give you a much better chance of thriving in the marketplace – it’s a great investment.
Otherwise, why not start on your first ebook today and see where it takes you?
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