Guys: Kindle is the Ticket!

So first month have been my 'test' month.

After 4 weeks/1 month
My income is approximately $150 with 5 non-fiction books. All in #1 choice niche. With one, in same niche, currently on pre-order now.

My income is .90 with 6 fiction books. (I sold two at 99cents)
I seem to have success where I thought I would - the non-fiction niche that I actually know about and enjoy.
The ghostwriters were extremely cheap, so I'm not upset about any cost spent here. LUCKILY, I am able to cover costs from my other IM ventures and my 9 to 5.

The whole idea is to not have to rely on 9 to 5.

My current plan is to repeat what I've done with the first 5 nonfiction books, with different pen names, and improve it with elements that I did not include before, which include
- mailchimp (created a site for my publishing company - with links at beginning and end at books)
- Larger books. All 5 are 10k-20k word books.
- Illustrations within the book(s)

I'll continue to test other non-fiction realms with ghostwriters, whilst I add in my own writing for what I know, and do some marketing myself. Not sure how much I can realistically write, myself (time-wise, speaking)

Any input would be awesome!

Sounds good, i'm seeing decent income from my first book, my second is on free promotion and I should receive another two tomorrow with a little luck!

And where are you selling ur ebooks guys ?

Read the thread......you might learn how to earn some easy money.
 
Be realistic. No one with any talent is going to write a 10k word book for $100. It takes too much time and effort, and they know they can get more money from someone else. You might get lucky to find someone talented for $300-500, but most talented writers are going to charge around 6 cents per word or $600 at least. If you do find a talented writer to write 1 cent per word then you lucked out, basically. Better hold on to them for as long as possible!

This is why I mentioned earlier that outsourcing is a waste of time (for me at least). I can write 2 or 3k words in an hour, so trying to edit shitty stuff from an outsourcer is a complete waste of time for me. It would take me just as long to edit their crap than to just write something from scratch. I have about 7 shitty books from outsourcers sitting in a folder, unreleased, that I'm tempted to just delete as they were a waste of time/money. Now think about the amount of time that you are spending searching for an outsource, writing a brief for them, arranging payments, editing, and then complaining on the forum how their work is garbage. In that time you could have finished a quality book yourself!

About "venturing out and writing about something you know nothing about"... What do you think the outsourcers do? Unless you are already an expert in a field and can write something you have knowledge about you're going to have to research. The only alternative is to write fiction, and then if you write fiction your results will be strongly related to your writing skills and ability to tell a good story.

There isn't really free ride in the Kindle Market... the amount of work you put into it is the amount you get out of it. There are tricks and such that can help speed up your results, but ultimately you have to work for the results. And just FYI I know several authors who have released 100+ books and are making less than $1000 per month. So not everyone can succeed at this.

You make an interesting point. But you should plan longer term.

To scale your business there is a point where you cannot do everything yourself. So you have to get other people to do the work and so you need a process set up in this case that you can outsource writing etc. It doesn't matter if you can or cannot actually do the work, you simply cannot do all the work required if you want to scale.

Remember "the art of good business is to be a good middleman."
 
Writing is only one part of it - the books need to be marketed to your target customer too.

K.
 
You make an interesting point. But you should plan longer term.

To scale your business there is a point where you cannot do everything yourself. So you have to get other people to do the work and so you need a process set up in this case that you can outsource writing etc. It doesn't matter if you can or cannot actually do the work, you simply cannot do all the work required if you want to scale.

Remember "the art of good business is to be a good middleman."

The once rapid growth of ebook sales has made a dramatic downturn and slowed and
there is some evidence it has gone into reverse.

There are reports of paper books making a comeback.

What now for the Golden Egg ???
 
You make an interesting point. But you should plan longer term.

To scale your business there is a point where you cannot do everything yourself. So you have to get other people to do the work and so you need a process set up in this case that you can outsource writing etc. It doesn't matter if you can or cannot actually do the work, you simply cannot do all the work required if you want to scale.

Remember "the art of good business is to be a good middleman."

I'm already making $1k per day on my own. Why on earth would I need anyone else to do to continue scaling or publishing long term? If I hire a writer, I have to waste time editing. I can create a cover in less time than it takes to write a brief for a cover designer and twiddle my thumbs waiting for it to come back.

Honestly, anyone who has any skill and speed in writing shouldn't waste their time outsourcing. It's money and extra time down the toilet, and you're rolling dice on outsourcers until you find one that is good... You'll most likely be focusing on producing quantities of mediocre books vs a few good books which may or may not hold their sales. If you're an unskilled writer, have poor grammar, type incredibly slow, not creative, non-native english or something... I can see why outsourcing could be beneficial. But all that time I would spend cleaning up someone else's mediocre material can just be transferred into good writing.

I might as some point consider setting up a company that hires outsourcers, editors, cover designers, and has someone publishing the crap for mediocre profits... but right now the time investment is too great. $1000 per month for 100 books isn't that interesting to me anymore. Too much work... Just straight writing the books and publishing them alone takes less time and produces 100x better results for me. I can publish a book every two days if I want, and my pen names have gotten enough support that every new release takes on a life of it's own as soon as it's published.
 
I'm already making $1k per day on my own. Why on earth would I need anyone else to do to continue scaling or publishing long term? If I hire a writer, I have to waste time editing. I can create a cover in less time than it takes to write a brief for a cover designer and twiddle my thumbs waiting for it to come back.

Honestly, anyone who has any skill and speed in writing shouldn't waste their time outsourcing. It's money and extra time down the toilet, and you're rolling dice on outsourcers until you find one that is good... You'll most likely be focusing on producing quantities of mediocre books vs a few good books which may or may not hold their sales. If you're an unskilled writer, have poor grammar, type incredibly slow, not creative, non-native english or something... I can see why outsourcing could be beneficial. But all that time I would spend cleaning up someone else's mediocre material can just be transferred into good writing.

I might as some point consider setting up a company that hires outsourcers, editors, cover designers, and has someone publishing the crap for mediocre profits... but right now the time investment is too great. $1000 per month for 100 books isn't that interesting to me anymore. Too much work... Just straight writing the books and publishing them alone takes less time and produces 100x better results for me. I can publish a book every two days if I want, and my pen names have gotten enough support that every new release takes on a life of it's own as soon as it's published.
The idea is that your $1,000/day equates to $365,000/year. So if you wanted to become a multi-million-dollar business, you would have to hire people in order to overcome the inevitable hurdle of surpassing a slump in growth. One way you could do this is by hiring a legit editor to do everything for you (the outsourcing, the spec writing, the editing, etc) for about $60,000/year. Tack on that $1,000/month you mentioned and you're looking at $72,000/year in expenses in exchange for going from $365,000/year to between $500,000 and $730,000/year.

Not saying you MUST scale up, though. If I make your success, I likely wouldn't bother either since that's 10x what I'm used to earning in a year.
 
A few quick questions for everyone (I'd appreciate your input here, Gringo and dsavior):

1) What would you price a bundle of 3 $2.99 ebooks? Each has a word count of 12,000 - 15,000 words. This is in a niche in which $2.99 for 5,000 to 20,000 words sells VERY well, so lazy competitors are flooding the niche with bundles (as many as 50 stories, but all under 3,000 words each) at that price rather than create quality books (the best of these bundles ranks beneath 50,000, most are beneath 100,000). I've noticed that the good competitors (10,000-15,000 word single books) are the ones doing well in the genre, but these are authors who don't bother with bundles at all.

2) Same question as above, only for a bundle of 4 $2.99 ebooks.

3) Is anybody doing 2-pack bundles? See any success with them?

4) Does anybody put their bundles at the 70% royalty rate? It's my understanding that if you don't make a book available for Kindle Unlimited/KOLL, then you're not allowed to use that royalty rate. However, I'm not sure if the money I earn from a 35% royalty off a bundle is worthwhile or not, since even a $9.99 bundle would bring in only $3.49, whereas the singles bring in $2.00 each. Meanwhile, if I do put a bundle up for downloading, then I can expect my overall download revenue to go down. Which do you recommend and why?

5) Is anybody using Createspace to make printed copies of all their books? I know many of you are doing it for the bundles, but being print-on-demand, why not for the singles as well?

Thanks again, everyone! Best of luck to all of you!
 
I think this is a great opportunity is there a minimum page per book?
 
Hi all,
Is there a zon sidekick "pro" to answer some questions/to give me some advices ?

Because I'm trying it since a few week and I didn't improve my niche searches and my sales.

So perhaps I didn't use it right.
 
Hi all,
Is there a zon sidekick "pro" to answer some questions/to give me some advices ?

Because I'm trying it since a few week and I didn't improve my niche searches and my sales.

So perhaps I didn't use it right.

Your best talking to Carepolice he owns Zon Sidekick :)
 
I'm already making $1k per day on my own. Why on earth would I need anyone else to do to continue scaling or publishing long term? If I hire a writer, I have to waste time editing. I can create a cover in less time than it takes to write a brief for a cover designer and twiddle my thumbs waiting for it to come back.

Honestly, anyone who has any skill and speed in writing shouldn't waste their time outsourcing. It's money and extra time down the toilet, and you're rolling dice on outsourcers until you find one that is good... You'll most likely be focusing on producing quantities of mediocre books vs a few good books which may or may not hold their sales. If you're an unskilled writer, have poor grammar, type incredibly slow, not creative, non-native english or something... I can see why outsourcing could be beneficial. But all that time I would spend cleaning up someone else's mediocre material can just be transferred into good writing.

I might as some point consider setting up a company that hires outsourcers, editors, cover designers, and has someone publishing the crap for mediocre profits... but right now the time investment is too great. $1000 per month for 100 books isn't that interesting to me anymore. Too much work... Just straight writing the books and publishing them alone takes less time and produces 100x better results for me. I can publish a book every two days if I want, and my pen names have gotten enough support that every new release takes on a life of it's own as soon as it's published.

Congratulations on your performance. In over 20 years in publishing, before Amazon even existed, I have not come across any writer who could continually and consistently write 3000 words an hour at high quality without any need for time to be spent editing it. Hell your like a machine. For mere mortals, time needs to be spent editing.

Your an exception, not the norm and as Dayspring says even on your stellar performance there comes a point when you cannot write anymore because you don't have enough time.

Your business model is for an author, most of the people on here are not high quality authors they are publishers. So the model we were discussing is a publishers model.

I agree with you if you have the money you are best outsourcing to people who are good, not crap as editing 100 books for $1000 per month is pointless. But it would be soul destroying to actually write 100 books for $1000 per month.

Of course you want the book to be good but the serious money is in which genre's sell, not who produces the book.

As an interesting aside there are actually some genres where I can a pretty much automate the writing of a book. I have developed code for a couple of them, where I just enter a few basic details and a high quality book is created pretty much instantly. So I guess I will technically be an author with them, but unless they are already famous, it illustrates how unimportant who creates the book is. Hence why people hire ghost writers. :)

It comes down to a choice of business model. Author or Publisher. You need talent to be an author you just need money to be a successful publisher. In any event to scale to a serious level you need other people to do the work, else you simply don't have the time to scale beyond a certain point. The best selling author in the world, James Patterson, realised that and so collaborates.
 
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Be realistic. No one with any talent is going to write a 10k word book for $100. It takes too much time and effort, and they know they can get more money from someone else. You might get lucky to find someone talented for $300-500, but most talented writers are going to charge around 6 cents per word or $600 at least. If you do find a talented writer to write 1 cent per word then you lucked out, basically. Better hold on to them for as long as possible!

This is why I mentioned earlier that outsourcing is a waste of time (for me at least). I can write 2 or 3k words in an hour, so trying to edit shitty stuff from an outsourcer is a complete waste of time for me. It would take me just as long to edit their crap than to just write something from scratch. I have about 7 shitty books from outsourcers sitting in a folder, unreleased, that I'm tempted to just delete as they were a waste of time/money. Now think about the amount of time that you are spending searching for an outsource, writing a brief for them, arranging payments, editing, and then complaining on the forum how their work is garbage. In that time you could have finished a quality book yourself!

About "venturing out and writing about something you know nothing about"... What do you think the outsourcers do? Unless you are already an expert in a field and can write something you have knowledge about you're going to have to research. The only alternative is to write fiction, and then if you write fiction your results will be strongly related to your writing skills and ability to tell a good story.

There isn't really free ride in the Kindle Market... the amount of work you put into it is the amount you get out of it. There are tricks and such that can help speed up your results, but ultimately you have to work for the results. And just FYI I know several authors who have released 100+ books and are making less than $1000 per month. So not everyone can succeed at this.

I have a question about your method of doing the research before deciding to write a fiction book, if you don't mind.

I am also attracted to writing books by myself, as I like doing creative things and am confident I can tell a good story if I set my mind to it, so I admire your success in accomplishing this.

My question is, do you simply go through fiction genres and look at the quality of the work you see, and decide if you can outdo them with your own book?

So you would be doing something similar to this while going through the categories, I assume:

"Mystery, Thriller & Suspense" --- > "Suspense" --- > "Paranormal" --- > "Psychics".

Then you would look at the quality of the work currently published in "Psychics" and decide on writing a book in that sub category based on how well you believe you can write better books than the current Top 10 of that category/sub-category.

Or would you target the more broad category "Suspense" in this case?

I would appreciate it if you replied to this, thank you in advance.
 
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Question: How many words is a minimum? I prefer light books with a price of about 3€/3$. How many words should there be?
 
I think this is a great opportunity is there a minimum page per book?

Question: How many words is a minimum? I prefer light books with a price of about 3€/3$. How many words should there be?

1) read the whole thread, it's been answered several times, but out of mercy I will respond

Kindle like anything is a business, so just put yourself in your consumer's shoes. There is no technical miniumum or maxiumum, it's all about your product's value. You could sell a 1 page book with 5 words for millions of dollars if it told people the secret to immortality. Likewise, you probably couldn't sell any copies of a 500 page book of me just banging my head against a keyboard.

Now obviously those are extreme examples, but it still applies somewhat. Make sure it feels like the value you providing is worth whatever money you're charging. Think of yourself buying your book, and figure out if your book would be worth your 2.99 or .99 cents or whatever

Secondly, look at your competitors, if their book is providing people with a satisfaction value of X, then you must provide value of X+1 in order to surpass them. I would say currently you probably shouldn't charge 2.99 for anything less than 5,000 words, but those better be a good 5000 words. Again you shouldn't really put numbers on it because there really is no right answer/
 
Has anybody seen more success with $2.99 books over $0.99 books? My understanding is that you should be earning a minimum of 12x as much money if you do. Am I wrong?
 
Great post OP. I'm an aspiring journalist and this would be a great way to create a supplementary income.
 
Nice one :) I really never thought that Kindle can be a good source of money :) But I will surely give it a try :) anyway thanks for the share
 
I've been publishing fiction on Amazon since November of 2013. It started off slow, but my best month I received over 6k from Amazon. While it is important to maintain good, quality work... I can tell you that if you aren't using the right keywords, have a professional cover, a good title and a catchy description, your good story won't amount to anything. People do judge a book by its cover and title! :)
 
I have a question about your method of doing the research before deciding to write a fiction book, if you don't mind.

I am also attracted to writing books by myself, as I like doing creative things and am confident I can tell a good story if I set my mind to it, so I admire your success in accomplishing this.

My question is, do you simply go through fiction genres and look at the quality of the work you see, and decide if you can outdo them with your own book?

Hey there. I can tell you it's not a matter of making your tale better... but a matter of having the best keywords, cover, title and description that you can. I've found that the best niches are New Adult, Romance and Erotica. If you have those 4 elements I just mentioned and decent content, you can do quite well. I have a friend that created a new pen name and submitted her first new adult tale under that brand new pen name. Because she had all 4 elements in place, she rocketed to a best-seller within that genre within a month's time. (Yes, and this was without having a mailing list too!)

So, my advice if you are wanting to publish fiction is to pick from one of the three genres I mentioned that holds the most interest for you, write your story, get a professional cover, name it well, dig for those keywords and write a captivating description. With that, you should be golden!
 
How long do you guys find it takes for a book to make it out of the "In Review" phase and get put up on Amazon. I'm aware it's faster as more and more get published, but they claim it's up to 12 hours and I've been waiting for about 4 days now. I'm almost ready to publish my second book, even.
 
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