Josh Barsch
Newbie
- Aug 1, 2013
- 2
- 12
Hi, everyone. First, let me add to the heaps of thank-yous to Gob Bluth for posting this great thread. May your development never be arrested. 
After reading the entire thread over 3 days, I thought I would post a few thoughts from a somewhat unique perspective. I actually wrote a book a few years back and have been a KDP publisher for almost two years. I never logged in very often to see how many sales I was making, but turns out I was making about 2 sales a day for the last year and a half.
I made some mistakes that I'll share with you so you can avoid them. Despite that, I was extremely motivated by this post and now have a goal, between me and my main partner in the ad agency I run, to get 100 Kindle books published within a year. We are both pretty prolific writers and it's very doable (I've digested all the ghostwriting advice here, but for now plan to write our own stuff). I've created a public spreadsheet about what I think we can expect revenue-wise with four tabs: each has projections for 2 sales per day per book, then 4, 8 and 16 (wishful thinking, but something to shoot for).
(I tried to insert the link to the document here, but I'm brand new to BHW and I don't have that permission yet. If anyone would like it and can tell me how to get it up here, I will! It's a very motivational docuemnt.)
My biggest mistake at the beginning was to post the book for 99 cents, locking myself into a 30-cent royalty, rather than pricing at $2.99 and getting a $2.10 royalty. Don't ask me for a great rationale for why I did that...I guess at the time I was thinking who cares, it's not going to be a big moneymaker anyway, and I knew I could sell more and get to the top of the best-seller list easier that way. In retrospect, it was pretty dumb, and I just proved it last week by switching to the 70% royalty at a $2.99 price point. My sales have dropped off by about 30% (although it's only been that way for a week, so this isn't necessarily indicative of any trend...it's summertime, and sales could bounce back to normal anytime). But even if my sales permanently drop 30%, I've still tripled-quadrupled my income on the book thanks to the higher royalty rate.
Borrows are often as good as sales. KDP has something called the KDP Select Global Fund, and basically it's a giant pool of money every month (for July, I believe it was $1 million). Every time your book is loaned to someone else, you get a stake in that pool of money. Each month, they add up all the borrows, and split the money equally among the publishers. So, for ease of math, let's say that KDP books were loaned 500,000 times in July. That means you'll get $2 for every time someone borrows your book. That's basically the same as a $2.07 royalty on a purchase, so that's pretty awesome. I don't know any particular way to encourage lending of your book once it's purchased, but if anyone else does, I'd love to hear it.
Do not underestimate the size of the Amazon world. I know that sounds fuzzy, but the truth of the matter is, the size of the potential audience is dizzying and really impossible to comprehend. Don't be quick to think no one will be interested to read about your topic -- if you address a human problem/concern with your book, there will be an audience for it. Here are the populations of the 10 Amazon country sites you can sell Kindle books on:
USA: 315 million
India: 1.2 billion
UK: 63 million
France: 65 million
Japan: 127 million
Germany: 80 million
Spain: 47 million
Italy: 60 million
Brazil: 193 million
Canada: 35 million
And of course, more are coming. Amazon China already exists, and once Amazon gets their system together to support other character sets, the market will explode even further. Yes, it's true that in some of these countries, much of that population is very poor and won't be buying Amazon Kindle books this year...but they're coming online quickly. And of course, you don't need all of them to buy your book to make yourself a comfortable income -- just the tiniest sliver.
I would echo a couple of the earlier sentiment in this thread: Everyone knows how to do something, and there are people out there who would love your instruction on how to do it!
Thanks, and good luck to everyone!
After reading the entire thread over 3 days, I thought I would post a few thoughts from a somewhat unique perspective. I actually wrote a book a few years back and have been a KDP publisher for almost two years. I never logged in very often to see how many sales I was making, but turns out I was making about 2 sales a day for the last year and a half.
I made some mistakes that I'll share with you so you can avoid them. Despite that, I was extremely motivated by this post and now have a goal, between me and my main partner in the ad agency I run, to get 100 Kindle books published within a year. We are both pretty prolific writers and it's very doable (I've digested all the ghostwriting advice here, but for now plan to write our own stuff). I've created a public spreadsheet about what I think we can expect revenue-wise with four tabs: each has projections for 2 sales per day per book, then 4, 8 and 16 (wishful thinking, but something to shoot for).
(I tried to insert the link to the document here, but I'm brand new to BHW and I don't have that permission yet. If anyone would like it and can tell me how to get it up here, I will! It's a very motivational docuemnt.
)My biggest mistake at the beginning was to post the book for 99 cents, locking myself into a 30-cent royalty, rather than pricing at $2.99 and getting a $2.10 royalty. Don't ask me for a great rationale for why I did that...I guess at the time I was thinking who cares, it's not going to be a big moneymaker anyway, and I knew I could sell more and get to the top of the best-seller list easier that way. In retrospect, it was pretty dumb, and I just proved it last week by switching to the 70% royalty at a $2.99 price point. My sales have dropped off by about 30% (although it's only been that way for a week, so this isn't necessarily indicative of any trend...it's summertime, and sales could bounce back to normal anytime). But even if my sales permanently drop 30%, I've still tripled-quadrupled my income on the book thanks to the higher royalty rate.
Borrows are often as good as sales. KDP has something called the KDP Select Global Fund, and basically it's a giant pool of money every month (for July, I believe it was $1 million). Every time your book is loaned to someone else, you get a stake in that pool of money. Each month, they add up all the borrows, and split the money equally among the publishers. So, for ease of math, let's say that KDP books were loaned 500,000 times in July. That means you'll get $2 for every time someone borrows your book. That's basically the same as a $2.07 royalty on a purchase, so that's pretty awesome. I don't know any particular way to encourage lending of your book once it's purchased, but if anyone else does, I'd love to hear it.
Do not underestimate the size of the Amazon world. I know that sounds fuzzy, but the truth of the matter is, the size of the potential audience is dizzying and really impossible to comprehend. Don't be quick to think no one will be interested to read about your topic -- if you address a human problem/concern with your book, there will be an audience for it. Here are the populations of the 10 Amazon country sites you can sell Kindle books on:
USA: 315 million
India: 1.2 billion
UK: 63 million
France: 65 million
Japan: 127 million
Germany: 80 million
Spain: 47 million
Italy: 60 million
Brazil: 193 million
Canada: 35 million
And of course, more are coming. Amazon China already exists, and once Amazon gets their system together to support other character sets, the market will explode even further. Yes, it's true that in some of these countries, much of that population is very poor and won't be buying Amazon Kindle books this year...but they're coming online quickly. And of course, you don't need all of them to buy your book to make yourself a comfortable income -- just the tiniest sliver.
I would echo a couple of the earlier sentiment in this thread: Everyone knows how to do something, and there are people out there who would love your instruction on how to do it!
Thanks, and good luck to everyone!
