How to Make Money with Kindle Direct Publishing [Case Study]

YOU ARE READING: How to Make Money with Kindle Direct Publishing [Case Study] AT PhebinhvanhocEN

With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), you can self-publish your book on Amazon and start making money in as little as 24 hours.

Sounds a lot better than waiting months or even years to find an agent, land a book deal, and go through all the traditional publishing gibberish for a print book, right?

You are reading: How to make money publishing books on amazon

and that’s not even the best part…

amazon lets you keep more of your money. much more.
with over 90 million top subscribers in the united states alone, the reach of amazon’s kindle store is enormous.
self-publishing with amazon kdp is absolutely, positively, 100%. free.

in short:

kindle publishing makes it possible for anyone to self-publish a digital book and sell it on amazon.

the only problem?

If you want your kindle book to be a success, if you want it to make real money, you can’t just “publish and pray”. you need a strategy.

That’s why I created this complete step-by-step guide.

I’ll show you how to validate your book idea before you start writing, how to set up a pre-launch sequence, how to price your self-published book appropriately, how to promote it, and more.

let’s go in…

how to validate your book idea (before you’ve written a single word)

If you want millions of people to read your powerful words, you need to make sure there is an existing audience of millions waiting to read them.

No one wants to waste time writing a book that no one wants to read.

That’s why it’s important to validate your book idea by evaluating the competition. You do this by answering three questions:

Are there similar books? If you can’t find a book (audiobook or print book) similar to yours on the amazon marketplace, that means you don’t have a good idea (because no one is so original).
can you compete? checking the competitive landscape gives you an idea of how well your book can sell.
are there enough buyers? You want to make sure enough people want the kind of book you plan to write to make it worthwhile.

You can find the answers to these questions in three steps:

step #1: find your category on amazon

first, you’ll need to find a suitable category for your book idea on amazon.

this is how:

go to amazon.com and go to departments > e-readers kindle & books > kindle books.

next, click on the best sellers & more on the menu.

scroll down until you see the menu below and click on kindle bestsellers.

select kindle ebooks from the menu.

choose a category and subcategory that most closely matches your book idea.

For my book, I chose the self-help category and the personal transformation subcategory.

Once you’ve chosen a subcategory, it’s time to research your potential competitors.

Step #2: Check the top 20 books in your category for similar themes

The premise of my book was self-reinvention. I didn’t need to find a book with the exact word “reinvention” in the title, but I did need to find books with similar themes like behavior change, personality change, and life change.

I found a few books that were similar to mine (#3 and #5 below explicitly state that they are about change, while #4 is a book about improving your life in generally).

At the end of this step, you will have answered the first question. you already know if there are books similar to your idea.

If you can’t find any similar books, you should go back to the beginning. check your list of book ideas and try again.

however, if there are books similar to yours, you can continue to the next step. will answer the final two questions:

can you compete and
are there enough buyers?

Step #3: Check the ranking of the best-selling books in your category

If you want to know if you can compete in a category and if there are enough potential readers, you need to know how well the books in your category are selling.

You won’t find actual sales numbers on amazon, but through their “best seller” rank you can get a decent estimate.

You can find a book’s best seller rating by scrolling down the product page. the range will appear below the product details.

the higher the rank (number 1 being the highest), the more copies it will sell, but also the harder it will be to beat. you should look for categories where the average best seller rank is neither too low nor too high.

This is how it’s usually broken down:

ranks above 1,000 will have great sales numbers, but will be very competitive.
ranks from 1,000 to 30,000 are less competitive, but will still have decent sales numbers.
Ratings of 30,000 and below are the least competitive, but will also have lower sales numbers.

As you can see, the sweet spot is in the middle. you don’t want a category that is too competitive and you don’t want a category with low sales numbers.

Aim for the categories where you think you can crack the top three books.

If you follow the strategies laid out in this post, you should be able to make it to the top three in categories with average competition.

And if you can get your book to appear in the top three when you release it, the chances of your book appearing on the new release list will skyrocket.

If you appear high enough on that list, your book will get a lot of exposure. Amazon will display your book in a prominent section above other books similar to yours, like this:

People search for books by category, but tend to skim through category pages. the higher you rank in a category, the better chance someone will click to buy your book.

That’s why it’s crucial to choose the right category.

If you think you can’t find the top three books in your initial category, see if you can submit your book in an alternate category where the competition is less strong.

how to package your book like a bestseller

You can write the most amazing book in the world, but if you don’t package it in an attractive way, few people will read it.

In this section, we’ll cover four important steps to packaging your book:

title
cover design
format
book description

Step #1: Create a memorable and descriptive book title

according to bestselling author tucker max:

or, put another way:

In short, it’s imperative that you get your title right. And to do that, you’ll need to spend considerable time brainstorming the two components of your title: the main title and the subtitle.

Your main title should be impactful and memorable. it should hint at the theme of the book and should resonate with your audience.

your subtitle is a bit different. he wants you to make it clear how your book will help your reader. so ask yourself:

Which of my reader’s pain points will my book solve?
What positive results will the book provide?
What kind of person will the reader be after to read his book? How will his life change?

For my book, I brainstormed 50 different main titles and 25 subtitles. not all of them were fantastic, but that’s the point.

When brainstorming titles, write whatever comes to mind. then review, crossing off the options you don’t like (or don’t like either). your favorites will remain.

To give you an idea of some ideas I had, here are some candidates for my main title:

you 2.0
the transformative magic of starting over
the power of reinvention

and these were some favorites for my subtitle:

unlock the secrets that keep you stuck and reprogram your mind for success
stop feeling stuck, reinvent yourself and become a new you
redesign your life, find your mental blind spots and master the art of personal transformation

the final title became: you 2.0: stop feeling stuck, reinvent yourself and become a new you: master the art of personal transformation.

step #2: get an attention-grabbing cover

I can’t stress enough the importance of this step. you need a good book cover design, or it won’t sell.

The cover gives potential buyers their first impression of your book. if it looks cheap and sloppy, they’ll assume it’s not worth their money.

A good book cover has, at a minimum, the following characteristics:

a clear, readable headline. Most of your potential buyers will first see your cover as a thumbnail, so your headline should be easy to read when reduced to that size. avoid small, hard-to-read letters and scrawled fonts.
a design that stands out. whether it stands out through a bold color or an interesting cover image , you want your cover to get noticed.

Now, if you’re tempted to design your own cover, I have a piece of advice: don’t.

Unless you’re a professional cover designer, you’re better off delegating this responsibility to someone else. this is not something you want to pinch pennies on.

remember, almost anyone can publish on the kindle platform, so any advantage over the competition is money well spent.

I personally hired happy selfpublishing to create my cover. his name kept coming up in the writing communities, so I gave them a try. I was not disappointed, they achieved a good balance between professionalism, quality and price.

When I hired happy selfpublishing, they sent me a questionnaire to collect my book information (title, subtitle, description, etc.) and my preferences for the cover design (preferred colors, fonts, etc.):

I filled out the questionnaire, gave my instructions to the designer, and sent samples of the covers I liked.

In a matter of days, he came back with several mockups.

We went through several rounds where I told him what I liked and didn’t like, and he would send me new mockups based on my (and my audience’s) feedback.

Finally, we decided on my final cover.

This is how my cover evolved over time:

step #3: make your book look pretty on the inside

In addition to your cover, you also need to format your book to make it look good

If all the text is mixed up, full of syntax errors, or written in a terrible font, people won’t want to read your book.

To avoid this, you must format and save your book as a kindle-compatible book file, such as .epub or .mobi format. this way it will look good on all kindle devices.

now, you can do it yourself or you can hire a professional to do it for you.

I formatted my book myself using easy-to-use software called vellum, which uses a simple wysiwyg (“what you see is what you get”) editor. just copy and paste your chapters into it, reformat as you like and export.

the only problem? vellum is only available on mac.

if you’re on a computer, you have alternative options like reedsy and book design templates.

Doing it yourself will save you some money, but if you’re not very tech-savvy and want to make sure the book is formatted correctly, hire someone.

happy desktop publishing, the company I used for my cover, also offers an affordable formatting service, or you can find hundreds of freelancers on upwork who can do it for you.

when you finish formatting, don’t forget to review the book with a kindle device (for example, the kindle fire or any kindle reader) or in the kindle app.

Be sure to check your formatting on an ipad, android tablet, and any smartphone to make sure the kindle app formats your book correctly on different platforms and devices.

make sure there are no formatting errors that need to be fixed.

step #4: write a description that sells your book for you

After your title and cover have drawn someone to your Amazon sales page, the next thing they’ll do is read your book description.

Readers will want to know exactly what your book is about and how it will benefit them.

If your description is flaccid and full of weak writing, it won’t be compelling enough to get readers to click the buy button.

Now, the key to understand when writing your book description is that you shouldn’t treat it like a summary of your book; rather, you should treat it like a sales letter.

Your description should not inform potential buyers about the content of your book; you must persuade them to buy.

here is mine, for example:

Do you see how I focus the description on the benefits for the reader?

See how I use bullet points to encourage curiosity rather than reveal the main points of the book?

These are basic sales letter techniques to use in your description.

Imagine if the second bullet point had said, “goal setting doesn’t work because of [reason].”

revealing the reason would nullify the reader’s need to buy the book. instead, I trigger curiosity by leaving it open.

If you’d like to learn more about writing persuasive descriptions, the following resources helped me a lot while I was writing my own:

how I wrote a famous book description
6 steps to a perfect book description that sells a ton of books
how to write a book description that sells

Before Your Book Launch: How to Create a Rock-Solid Plan

your pitch makes or breaks your book.

so you shouldn’t wait until the week of its release to start planning for it.

Instead, you want to have a plan in place and have your marketing materials prepared weeks before you go live.

here are some things you should do to prepare for your book launch.

step #1: create your “street team” (launch minus 6+ weeks)

Before your release, you must assemble a so-called “street team” to help write reviews of your book and promote it during release week.

I reached out to people in my network (fellow authors and bloggers I had known over the years since I started my blog) and asked them to join.

If you don’t have a well-established network, you can leverage your email list, as New York Times bestselling author Kevin Kruse explains in this video:

When you communicate with people in your network, explain what is expected of them. make sure they understand what it means to be a member of your street team:

explain that they should read a copy of the book for advanced readers and prepare a review to post at the beginning of the launch.
encourage them to share the book on their favorite social networks or with their lists of email. explaining this is optional, but I would be very grateful.

For the number of reviews you want, double that number of people on your street team, because chances are only half of them will actually review your book.

Aim for at least 25 reviews. this means having 50 people on your launch team.

Step #2: Start promoting your book on your list (launch minus 6+ weeks)

Once you’ve written your book and can see its release on the horizon, you’ll want to gently tease your subscribers that it’s coming.

you need to build anticipation.

Up to this point, I had been keeping my list active by sending motivational emails on Mondays every week, as well as an update every time I published a new blog post.

While preparing for the launch, I added teasers to the bottom of my emails, like this:

You don’t have to sell it much at this point. just let them know the book is coming.

Step #3: Map out your launch plan and prepare promotional materials (launch minus 6+ weeks)

You should never improvise when launching a book.

If you’re smart, you’ll plan every step you take before launch, as well as the days and weeks after.

You need to create a schedule so you know exactly what promotion happens, when, and what actions you need to take each day.

(I’ll share my own promotion schedule in the next section, which you can emulate).

once you have everything planned, the next step is to prepare everything.

In the weeks leading up to my release, I prepared:

the sequence of emails promoting the book to my subscribers
the emails I would send to my street team
30 days of promotional items I would send post on medium
social media posts to promote the book

For promotional items, I also prepared some new incentives geared towards promoting the book:

If you don’t prepare for the launch beforehand, you will feel exhausted and frustrated throughout the launch.

You will work hard to promote the book instead of having a strategy that makes you feel confident that the book will sell.

plan ahead and you’ll launch hard.

book launch: step by step guide (with examples)

now let’s get to the good stuff.

You can think of your launch as happening when you publish your book on Amazon and put it up for sale.

and you’re not wrong. technically, that’s when you officially release your book.

But the release process is a bit more complicated than just clicking a publish button, and it starts long before your official release.

start with your first big promotion. that’s when you start selling your book.

Below you will find the timeline I used when I launched my book. feel free to copy it, modify it and use it as your own.

Step #1: Send “free sample” emails (launch minus 4 weeks)

Four weeks before its official launch, you want to send free samples to your subscribers. send them a free sample every week.

this will give them an idea of what is inside your book.

I sent my own subscribers my book introduction, chapter one and chapter two.

Of course, you don’t have to use your first few chapters. you can choose to share any chapter you want.

share the ones you think will make your readers want more.

step #2: publish your book on kindle direct publishing [and set your price] (launch minus 1 week)

You never have to wait until the official release date to publish your book on amazon. you must publish it a week in advance.

This way you can ask your street team to write reviews early.

These early reviews are important – you’ll need to have at least 10 reviews if you want to use book promotion sites during launch week.

(And you do, as they can give you a huge boost in early sales. More on that later.)

To publish your book on Amazon, you must create a Kindle Direct Publishing account (kdp.amazon.com).

then follow these steps to publish your book:

#1. go to “create a new title” and click “+ kindle ebook”

#2. enter the book information (language, title, subtitle, etc.)

#3. enter your book description

note: you can use html tags to change the way content appears on your book page.

#4. choose your keywords

amazon allows you to use up to seven keywords to help readers find your books. you want to match your keywords to terms that readers typically type into the search box.

To find good keywords, you can:

search for keywords manually. check out this detailed guide if you don’t know how.
use keyword tools like kindle spy, trade words, and kdp rocket that provide data on how many people search for certain keywords.
use names of authors and popular books. you can associate your name with top books to divert some of the traffic going to their names.

#5. choose your categories

Initially, you can only choose two category/subcategory combinations from the list provided by Amazon. strangely, your list doesn’t include all your categories.

You will find that many of the niche categories are missing. (You’ll have a hard time trying to crack the top three in most of the broader categories.)

For now, however, choose two categories/subcategories that your book fits into:

After publishing your book, search for books similar to yours and see what categories they fall under. then contact amazon and ask them to add your book to those categories.

In fact, if you’re smart, you can follow this process to add yourself to ten categories, instead of just two.

here’s a video by dave chesson from kindlepreneur explaining how to approach this:

#6. upload your cover and manuscript files

#7. enter pricing information

what should your book price be?

Before we get into that, you need to understand amazon’s pricing and royalty options:

for kindle books priced from $0.99 to $2.98, receive a 35% royalty on every sale.
for kindle books priced from $2.99 to $9 .99, you receive a 70% royalty on each sale.
for kindle books priced over $9.99, you receive a 35% royalty on each sale.

Note: If your book is part of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, you will be paid based on the total number of pages read in a given month.

Now, you might think that pricing your book between $2.99 and $9.99 is the obvious way to go, as it will give you the most royalties.

but to start with, I priced my book at $0.99.

I suggest you do the same. here’s why:

The goal of this is not to make a lot of money at the beginning, but to get a lot of sales at the beginning.

Amazon doesn’t look at the price of your book to determine how well it’s selling. look at the number of copies sold.

If you can sell a ton of 99-cent copies early on, you’ll benefit from some algorithmic momentum even after you raise the price.

Also, when you price the book at $0.99, you can use promotional sites to showcase your book to mass audiences at launch.

(You can even tell your subscribers you’re running an early book sale, offering them an incentive to buy as soon as possible, before you raise the price.)

#8. scroll down and click publish your kindle ebook

once you’ve clicked to publish your book, it will appear on amazon within 24-48 hours.

Step #3: Request reviews from your street team (launch minus 6 days)

When publishing books on Amazon, whether written by you or a trusted ghostwriter, those early days are critical.

If you don’t have anyone buying your book or leaving reviews as soon as you publish it, the chances of it taking off are slim to none.

This is where your street gear comes into play.

The moment your book is published, you should send an email to your street team asking them to leave reviews.

and this is important: you must first ask them to download the book from amazon and then write their reviews. if they don’t do it in this order, their reviews won’t be verified. they will still appear, but amazon will not give them as much importance.

If you prefer not to ask them to pay $0.99 to leave a review, you can sign up for “kdp select” and run a free promotion for 72 hours.

That way, they can “purchase” the book for free, and Amazon should still mark their reviews as verified.

step #4: schedule promotions (launch minus 5 days)

I mentioned book promotion sites earlier. So what exactly are they?

Basically, they are sites that promote books while they are free or priced at $0.99. these sites have massive lists of subscribers who love to read books, and all of them will receive an email with a link to your book.

These readers can give you a gigantic boost in early sales.

These are the sites I used myself, along with the cost of using each one:

buck books: $29
butterfly books: $40
robin lee: $55
james mayfield: $10
fussy librarian — $30

I found these sites in a list compiled by dave chesson on kindlepreneur.

Now, considering you’ll only make $0.35 per sale on a $0.99 book, you won’t make much money using these promotional sites. you might even lose some money.

then why use them?

because you want to build a track record of sales success.

amazon will promote your book for you if it sees you have your own sales.

When published authors make money, amazon makes money, because your author earnings are also your author earnings, but like any good business, you won’t recommend products with no earning potential.

You don’t have to use five services like I do. but use at least three.

step #5: launch your book with force (7 day plan)

Alright, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. It’s time to officially release your book to the public.

During launch week, you need to promote your book heavily. Hopefully, you’ve done the work of preparing yourself so you don’t feel overwhelmed.

You must promote your book by:

sending a sales sequence to your email list. (examples of each email will be given below).
ask your street team to help you promote the book on social media and/or your email lists.
carry out book promotions. I’ve configured. (You should have already scheduled them, as indicated in the previous step.)
Promote the book on social networks. (I recommend using the buffer to schedule multiple social media posts per day).
publish content from your content marketing campaign.

This is how I scheduled these activities during launch week:

day 1:

Send an announcement email (see example #1 below).
Ask your street team to promote your book on social media (or their lists). of email).
publish promotional content in the middle.

day 2:

send a soft sell email. (see example #2 below).
run 10 social media posts.

day 3:

run your first book marketing promotion (buck books).
run 10 social media posts.
post promotional content in the middle.

day 4:

send another soft sell email to your list.
send a reminder email to your street team for social media promotion/email list.
post promotional content in between.

day 5:

run your second book marketing promotion (james mayfield & books butterfly).
run 10 social media posts.
post promotional content on the medium.

day 6:

Send a hard sell email to your list. (see example #3 below).
run 10 social media posts.
post promotional content in between.

day 7:

do your third book marketing promotion (picky librarian and robin’s readings).
send a price change email. (see example #4 below).
post promotional content in the middle.
make 10 social media posts.

Here are some examples of each email in my sales sequence:

after kindle publishes your book: keep book sales and royalties coming in

To make money writing, your book can’t be lightning.

You have to keep promoting the book to keep sales going.

As I mentioned earlier, you want to get the book off to a good start with a boost of early sales to benefit from Amazon’s algorithms. but you should keep your momentum going longer than the first week.

For weeks after launch, you should continue to engage your list and keep spreading the word about your book to new readers.

here are some things you can do:

Step #1: Raise the price once a week (and let your subscribers know)

As mentioned above, I priced my book at $0.99 for the first week. If I kept selling at this price, my royalties would still be low.

so, after the first week, I increased the price to $2.99, then $3.99, and finally $4.99.

every time I was about to raise the price, I would send my subscribers a price change email.

This not only reminded casual readers to buy the book, it gave them an incentive to do so.

If they didn’t agree to the low price that day, they would miss out forever and no one likes to miss out on a great deal.

Step #2: Keep posting to get people on your list

after publishing your book, you must continue to publish articles with links to your registration form. every new subscriber is a new potential buyer.

Set up a welcome autoresponder sequence that offers subscribers your incentive (and then introduces them to your book).

You can use the same (or similar) sales sequence that you used for your launch.

I wrote a total of 30 posts over 30 days on medium to promote the book, and this added 150 more sales within the first month of my release.

step #3: create an amazon ad campaign for sales on autopilot

amazon marketing services provides a “pay per click” advertising program for authors. I recommend you use it.

this is how you can create your own amazon ads:

click new campaign:

then choose sponsored product ads.

select the book you want to advertise. (If you’ve only published one book, you’ll only have one option.)

set your campaign name, budget and select manual targeting.

Initially, $3-$5 per day is a good budget because you can get useful data without breaking the bank.

less than $3 won’t get you enough data, and more than $5 can cost you money if you’re not careful.

scroll down to the add keywords section and click add your own keywords.

Next, search for relevant keywords.

You’ll need a lot more keywords for your ad campaign than you did before when you published your book.

but you can use similar techniques to find them:

type relevant words and phrases into the amazon search bar and see what keywords amazon suggests (as shown below).
explore best seller categories and use titles of popular book/author names as keywords.
Use the “customers also bought” section of books from the best-selling categories to find related book/author titles to use as keywords.
download the software. kindle spy and kdp rocket are two tools that instantly provide relevant keywords for your book.

set the bid price for your keywords:

A bid price is the most you’re willing to spend if someone clicks your ad.

I added 1,000 keywords (the maximum amount allowed per ad) and set the bid to 10 cents. I didn’t want to spend too much money until I knew what kind of results I’d get.

If the ads were performing well, I planned to increase my daily budget and keyword bids.

Once you’ve set your offer price, you’re ready to enter your ad’s marketing message:

Finally, it’s time to preview your ad.

If you like what you see, click submit campaign for review.

after 24-48 hours, your ad will be active (if approved, of course).

Step #4: Increase your winning ads and weed out losers

After posting your ad, let it run for two weeks. then it’s time to analyze the data.

here is a screenshot of my ad panel:

The key metrics you want to see are:

impressions: the number of times people saw your ad.
clicks: the number of people who clicked on your ad.
acpc: the cost average per click on your ad.
spend: total amount spent.
acos: average cost of each sale. if your acos is 25%, you spend 25 cents of every dollar you earn. if it’s 75%, you spend 75 cents of every dollar you earn. if it’s 125%, you spend $1.25 for every dollar you earn, which means your ad costs more than you earn.

You can click on the campaign itself to see these same metrics for individual keywords. use those metrics to adjust your campaign.

for example, when you see that a specific keyword is costing you more than it earns, you can stop that keyword.

Once you see how your keywords are performing, you can extend the reach of your campaign in the following ways:

increase your bids. once I saw that my campaigns were working well, I increased the bids on the keywords to 20 cents, then 30 cents, and finally 50 cents per word key code.
add more keywords. the more keywords you have, the more opportunities for new sales. I started an additional campaign with 1,000 more keywords.
Increase total spend. If you find that your daily budget is being spent quickly, increase it. I increased my spending from $5 to $10 to $15 to $20. As long as my ads make money, I’ll keep investing in them.

common questions (not covered elsewhere)

well, we’ve covered a lot here.

and yet there is so much more we could talk about. Let’s try to go over some common questions that some of you may still have:

do i need a set audience before i can self-publish on amazon?

not at all.

I only had 250 subscribers when I released my first book. And while I took a relatively passive role in promoting the book (I ran a few promotions during launch to give myself an early boost, and then relied mostly on Amazon’s algorithm to drive sales), it made its first $1,000 in five months.

Not a result worth bragging about, but it was enough to inspire me to write a second book and do it much better.

So for my second book, I was much more strategic, growing my audience and promoting the book a lot more. and this time, I hit $1000 in the first month.

Even better: The book grossed over $10,000 in its first year, which was a huge improvement over the first book, which made $2,000 in the same time frame.

the lesson?

You can make money writing even if you have a small list, and even if you take a somewhat passive role in promoting it.

but with that said…

what can i do to grow my audience before i dive into kindle publishing?

This is what I did to increase my audience for my second book:

Step #1: Create a compelling incentive for people to join

People rarely give up their email addresses for nothing, so you need to offer them an incentive to join your email list.

To be honest, I kind of cheated here, because I offered something I already had available. I offered my first book, the formula of destiny.

Ideally, you want to offer an incentive that is a perfect complement to the book you are writing.

For example, if you were writing a book on the paleo diet, you could offer one of these incentives:

5 delicious paleo recipes you can make in 15 minutes or less
7-day paleo email quick start course
the ultimate list of paleo snacks (includes 250 sandwiches)

Step #2: Set up a landing page to collect email addresses

If you want to build your email list, you need two things: an email marketing platform to store your list, and a landing page where people can sign up for your list.

Now, you have several options when it comes to email marketing platforms, but here are three popular ones:

convertkit (affiliate link)
mailchimp
aweber

Personally, I opted for convertkit because they built it specifically for professional bloggers. It comes with easy targeting features that allow you to promote your book in a more targeted way. I highly recommend it, but any of these platforms will work.

Once you’ve set up your email marketing platform, you can create a landing page to capture people’s email addresses.

I used master pages to do this, which makes creating landing pages simpler. comes with ready-to-use templates that you can modify with its drag-and-drop builder.

You can choose one of their templates and customize it to your liking.

here is a screenshot of the landing page i created:

Once you have everything in place, all you need to do is send traffic to your landing page.

Step #3: Drive traffic to your landing page

my personal goal was to reach 3000 subscribers before publishing my book. my main strategy to reach that number was to publish articles in the media, each one with a link to my landing page.

every article I published on medium would include this offer at the end:

But I didn’t stop there. I’ve also guest-posted on huffington post, thrive globally, addicted2success, thought catalog, the search, and more.

Although I got most of my traffic from media, posting on these sites still increased my subscriber base by a significant portion.

Between posting in the middle and guest posting on these sites, I reached my goal of 3,000 subscribers in six months.

You don’t need to reach the same number of subscribers, but I recommend building your list to at least 1,000 before you launch your book.

will make things much easier.

how can i generate ideas for my own book?

One of the worst mistakes you can make when self-publishing is choosing a topic you know little about.

If you still don’t have a concrete idea in mind, don’t worry.

Here’s an exercise to help you generate ideas. take paper and pencil and answer the following questions:

What do you find easy that others find difficult?
If you could only pick one section at a barnes & noble bookstore to read, which section would you choose?
what seems obvious to you that is not obvious to others?
what topic leads you to talk to the point where you don’t you will do it? stop talking?
if you had to take some freelance writing jobs online (either to earn extra income or flex your writing muscles), what topics would interest you the most?
what do your friends and family tell you you’re good at?
what compliments have you received from strangers?
what types of articles do you read online?

once you complete your inventory, check it for patterns.

maybe you’re a great communicator. maybe you have excellent financial habits. Or maybe you have a gift for motivating others.

the traits, knowledge, and skills you possess can be translated into themes for books.

Go through the list and use your answers to brainstorm some book ideas.

what if I want to physically print books? (like a traditional editor)

You’re in luck.

if ebook publishing isn’t your thing, you’ll be pleased to hear that kindle directpublishing added a paperback option in 2016 kdp print (formerly known as createspace) provides independent author print-on-demand technology that allows them to publish books in paperback and ebook format. you can do it all from the same kdp account.

are you ready to dive into amazon kindle direct publishing?

I’m working on my next book right now.

With an even larger audience than when I released my last book, my goal is to sell at least 10,000 copies of my third book in the first year.

and you?

Now you know how to validate your book ideas, package your book, create a pre-launch sequence, launch your book, and promote it.

now you know what to do and when to do it.