Guys: Kindle is the Ticket!

[I-marketer]

If you choose the correct niche you can get some pretty big numbers.

I have a few books that sell over 100 copies per day. My average is 5-10 and I don't bother with following anything up that sells less than 3 copies per day.

If I remember correctly, all your books are in fiction genre? Do you have any experience with non-fiction? How would that compare in terms of sales, pricing, etc...

 

[Carepolice]

Anyone else take a look at some of those photo tour books that are simply blatant ripoffs of Chinese travel blog posts? I saw this trending in Zon Sidekick a while back and that author keeps on publishing. I think he/she is funneling money into their own listings because I can't see how anyone would be willing to buy a book with nothing more than 10-15 pictures and no text.

Here's an example: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_ath...&search-alias=digital-text&sort=relevancerank

What are your thoughts?

 

[boottothehead]

Anyone else take a look at some of those photo tour books that are simply blatant ripoffs of Chinese travel blog posts? I saw this trending in Zon Sidekick a while back and that author keeps on publishing. I think he/she is funneling money into their own listings because I can't see how anyone would be willing to buy a book with nothing more than 10-15 pictures and no text.


What are your thoughts?

Wow, besides being the height of laziness this is also brilliant, not something that I would bring myself to do but brilliant all the same. Looking at a couple of them they are ranking quite nicely. A little surprised that they're selling at all but then again I don't know what the competition is for the categories that they're ranking in, might not take too many sales to rank there.

~~ UPDATE ~~ Slid this idea over to a photographer friend of mine who has terabytes of pictures, all personally shot and owned. Might be a new niche, anything coming of those will also include some text I'm sure and will not smack of ripped off content. Here's to hoping.

 

[GringoMonkey]

If I remember correctly, all your books are in fiction genre? Do you have any experience with non-fiction? How would that compare in terms of sales, pricing, etc...

Hi,

I sell both fiction and non fiction, I have several hundred now it is just on balance that I have more fiction.

I charge the same $2.99 for both.

A lot of the answers to peoples questions are spread across multiple threads. So you need to read them.

But basically I am NEVER going to write the next Harry Potter and chances are neither are you. So this becomes a numbers game.

Research a niche that is selling, see what your competitors are doing then either a) do it better or b) do it a little different and it will sell. Then move onto the next book.

Learn to do that quickly and scale up the amount of books you have.

Typically 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your books. You just need to find your 20% ASAP and scale that.

 

[messedaround]

Hi

I have a question about this.

So i am really interested in this, I consider myself to have great writing skills.

So you are basically saying.

You find a niche, write an outline of a story, and get someone else to write it for you.

Where do you find someone to do that cheaply? Looking online some people charge 100 per 500 words..

 

[GringoMonkey]

Hi

I have a question about this.

So i am really interested in this, I consider myself to have great writing skills.

So you are basically saying.

You find a niche, write an outline of a story, and get someone else to write it for you.

Where do you find someone to do that cheaply? Looking online some people charge 100 per 500 words..

As you said you feel you are good at writing then write the first few yourself, then you will get a feel for things, see which ones sell and then scale them.

Then it all depends on how much investment capital you have. If you can hire lot of writers you will scale a lot faster.

 

[messedaround]

This has made me really determined to try this, have just started. Not confident though.

 

[Carepolice]

Wow, besides being the height of laziness this is also brilliant, not something that I would bring myself to do but brilliant all the same. Looking at a couple of them they are ranking quite nicely. A little surprised that they're selling at all but then again I don't know what the competition is for the categories that they're ranking in, might not take too many sales to rank there.

~~ UPDATE ~~ Slid this idea over to a photographer friend of mine who has terabytes of pictures, all personally shot and owned. Might be a new niche, anything coming of those will also include some text I'm sure and will not smack of ripped off content. Here's to hoping.

I'm glad that gave you an angle to run with. I do think it's worth repeating that I believe these guys are funneling their own money into the books to inflate those numbers. The whole thing is a bit "off" so I suggest starting small before you invest too much of your time into that space.

 

[Pinger030]

 

[Narisu]

 

[boottothehead]

 

[frizenking]

It's very good that people are earning money
I'm interested,do you write these books yourself?Or you hire someone?And if you hire someone,how much do you pay them?
And OP said in the first post that it is possible to produce one book per day,well,that book would be somehwere between 20-40 pages maybe?(IDK I've never written a book)
Oh,and one more question,does it matter if the book is 40 pages or let's say 150 pages?Is there a big difference between their prices and do people buy that small books?

 

[Pinger030]

It's very good that people are earning money
I'm interested,do you write these books yourself?Or you hire someone?And if you hire someone,how much do you pay them?
And OP said in the first post that it is possible to produce one book per day,well,that book would be somehwere between 20-40 pages maybe?(IDK I've never written a book)
Oh,and one more question,does it matter if the book is 40 pages or let's say 150 pages?Is there a big difference between their prices and do people buy that small books?

When you are new you should write your first book(s) by yourself to make your own experiences with the whole publishing process and also with fiction/non-fiction writing, niche/keyword research and so on. Buy a A-Z guide about Selfpublishing to get an overview about the whole process and read this thread completely.

If you have success with your first book(s) and if you know what's working the next step is to outsource the writing to scale up your output ratio/income. If you have enough ideas/niches try to outsource as much as you can. The only limit is your personal budget and your skills/time to handle/market so much books. My own experience: I'm in this game since May 2014 and also have quitted my job for Selfpublishing. So I am doing it full time but I couldn't market 1 book per day permanently. You have to analyse the market for niches, create the covers, find good keywords, write the product description, format the book files, maybe promote your books on external websites, manage your own blog + email list, manage your FB + Twitter accs, read more about Selfpublishing/success/personal development and the most important thing: Have fun and enjoy to make money! The primary goal is not to reach 10k/month. The way is the goal and you live right now. So you have to enjoy it right now. So I prefer to pusblish 2 books per week constantly but market them excellent. But I have much respect if someone is able to publish 1 book per day.

To your page count/price question: It only depends on your niche(s). Look at the competitors books in your niche and look at their page counts, prices and rankings. Then you can say: If I would publish a comparable book (eg. with 60 pages, with a comparable quality) I can sell my book for this price (eg. $2,99). But you can also say: If I produce a better book than my competitors (eg. with 120 pages, a much higher quality and so on) I can sell it for eg. $4,99.

Try to imagine: In the car industry there are different product classes. There are less quality cars for a low price but there are also expensive cars with a high quality and maybe some bonuses. Both classes are working because there a people with less money who want cheap cars but there are also successful people who mant to buy a Mercedes with high quality. But you can not sell a low quality car for the same price like the Mercedes. No one will buy it. Now compare it with your business: Your market is your category/niche on the Amazon Kindle Store. And there are eg. Low quality books for $0,99 but also high quality books for $6,99. But it depends on the niche (and the competitors) to decide what's low and what's high quality. Eg. If you want to publish a book in the medical category maybe the lowest quality has 200 pages and price of $6,99 and a high quality book has 400 pages and a price of $14,99 (just an extreme example). Conclusion: It only depends on your category/niche. For my current niche a page count of 60 is enough to sell my books for $2,99 (but this answer won't help you because every niche is different).

So, try to answer: What is the right price for a car? Answer: There is no right or wrong price. It depends on the quality you want for your money (and the whole car market/competitors who define what's the price for low and high quality).

Hope you understand it. Please read the whole thread because such (basic)answers are already given here for many times. If you are not able to read you will fail. The quality-price-ratio question is general knowledge. If you had thought about yor question you had to give the answer by yourself. That shows me that you are not willing/able to think alone. But you have to think alone if you want to be successful because there is no step by step guide with a guarantee how to make money. And exactly this mind set differs a successful business man and a general worker. Try to think alone about such basic question.

 

[superleeds90]

Ok guys, just submitted my first book. Really excited!

I have a question though...



I take it I'll be able to select the 5-day free promo after it's 100% published?

 

[Morgadeshou]

superleeds90: Yup, all of the options will appear as soon as your book is completely uploaded

Question for the experienced publishers, firstly, I'm really impressed with everyone and their success. I've started publishing as a hobby and have about 5 books out right now selling about 5-6 copies a day. I've recently wanted to get involved in the diet books/cook books as they seem to have a lot of promise. I was just curious, how do you guys get your recipies? Do you just grab them off of blogs/the internet and tweak them? or do you have to jump through some legal loopholes in order to publish other peoples recipes? I feel like most people are just copy and pasting recipes directly from the internet into their books, but I don't want to make that mistake and get into trouble. Any advice on this topic would be greatly appreciated!

Also, do you guys have any tips on promoting during free days? I've been able to get about 1000 downloads a day, but never able to crack the 100 free list. So far for promoting I mostly just submit to ebook blogs/site, and advertise on facebook/twitter, pretty standard stuff. Is there something else people have found that works better?

 

[Pinger030]

@Morgadeshou

I am also in a specific diet niche with some cook books. There is no copyright on recipes. It is just illegal if you take a complete list of recipes from one source. Use different sources and make sure that you rewrite preparations of the recipes (because Amazon can detect copied content and will set your book to $0.00 permanently. Another suggestion: If you write cook books for a specific diet it is absolutely necessary that you write all the nutrition facts to the recipes (I calculate the nutrition facs with an online calc).

You see that writing cookbooks it's not so easy at you think. It's a really uncreative and boring work. After 9 cook books (about 600 different recipes) I can not see this anymore.

Free days: I don't count on the 5 free days because every publisher is doing that. Create some books and set them perma free. Think about it: Let's say you publish 3 perma free books and you only get 100 DLs per day on each book = 300/day = 9000/month. If you put ads to your other books, a link to your fb site/blog and ParnterNet affiliate links (no it is not allowed but it works if nobody report it) you have more benefits than of the 5 day free period. I don't waste my time to promote my books on any external website because that doesn't work for long term. Kindle should be a set it and forget it business - a 100% passive income - that works automatically. Its not in my mind that I have to promote every single book every 90 days. How should that work if you have 100 books sometime? So don't waste your time and publish new books. Hold your books successful by perma free books a fb site, blog (+email list) and so on - that's more effective than submitting your book to other websites.

 

[WizGizmo]

Hi B-Hatters:

When this thread was first created, the OP, "GobBluthJD" did a great job
and answered members questions for quite some time. However, I just
looked at his profile and I can see that he hasn't logged onto BHW since
January of this year. Therefore, we can assume that he has abandoned
this thread or possibly something happened to him.

Regardless, I will leave the thread open, but you guys will have to carry
on the discussion amongst yourselves, without his assistance.

Thank You - "Wiz"

 

[superleeds90]

What's a good number of downloads to be aiming for in the 5 days when you make your book free?

 

[Morgadeshou]

if you can crack the 100 free rank then you're in really good shape, but thats really hard, ive only ever gotten to 115 (so close!), and that was with about 1000 downloads a day. But what's considered a good number also depends on your niche, you need more downloads in competitive niches and less in non-competitive niches in order for your book to rank higher in search results after the promo ends. So I'm normally happy with approx 1000 a day in harder niches and like 300-600 a day in easier niches

 

[superleeds90]

if you can crack the 100 free rank then you're in really good shape, but thats really hard, ive only ever gotten to 115 (so close!), and that was with about 1000 downloads a day. But what's considered a good number also depends on your niche, you need more downloads in competitive niches and less in non-competitive niches in order for your book to rank higher in search results after the promo ends. So I'm normally happy with approx 1000 a day in harder niches and like 300-600 a day in easier niches

Thanks!

Can I ask how many books you have published?