Guys: Kindle is the Ticket!

I seem to be temporally stumped with regard to fiction.

I have not sold one copy, have 3 books out now for a little over a month and have 2 more on deck waiting and done with covers finished. I'm just sitting on them until I can crack this fiction code.

I may just stick with non-fiction.

I feel like Vince McMahon and the XFL.

NemoTheOne said:

I seem to be temporally stumped with regard to fiction.

I have not sold one copy, have 3 books out now for a little over a month and have 2 more on deck waiting and done with covers finished. I'm just sitting on them until I can crack this fiction code.

I may just stick with non-fiction.

I feel like Vince McMahon and the XFL.

Click to expand...

It sounds like the genre you picked at the outset / the way you have structured it isn't what people are looking for.

In future do not try to scale into as series from the outset, only the books that sell. Else you spend a lot of time and money on something that does not work and then scale that.

A lot of people seem to have a similar issue so I am thinking of offering another JV where I can look over peoples books and help set them in the right direction, before the commit heavily. Would you be interested if I did something like that?

Yes I think that your consulting JV service would be GREAT!
In the mean time and in the spirit of this thread, do you have any suggestions?

GringoMonkey said:

You need to make I think 15 posts to PM there is no other way to PM. In respect of my JV it is full now, so I have closed it to anyone I am not currently dealing with.

Click to expand...

All of your outsourcing team is busy now? hehe

grate post tnx for the info

Well, i think one of the biggest problem in fiction is to find a good writer.
Out of 100 in odesk, only 3 was good enouf to keep them.

By the way, there is one thing i simple don't understand.
I see very bad writers that get's tons of work done...
I mean they work non stopped, with some repeats customers.
How the hell they make money from this shity writing?
I guess those guys just use some black hat tricks, because i have no other explanation.

Rose111 said:

Well, i think one of the biggest problem in fiction is to find a good writer.
Out of 100 in odesk, only 3 was good enouf to keep them.

By the way, there is one thing i simple don't understand.
I see very bad writers that get's tons of work done...
I mean they work non stopped, with some repeats customers.
How the hell they make money from this shity writing?
I guess those guys just use some black hat tricks, because i have no other explanation.

Click to expand...

If you take your writing as a reference, I can see why you think their writing skills suck.

GringoMonkey said:

Hi,

I will try and answer your points.

I can usually tell in the first 2 days if a book is a winner. I usually find sales increase over time before starting to fade a little, but not that much. The key is to scale into a high quality series. Then there is a point when it charts and gets syndicated and then you get a ramp up. But there is no specific answer, it really depends on the type of book as to it's slower period.

Do not get preoccupied with any of that though. Just concentrate on a good quality book in an in demand niche. If people want it Amazon will take care of the rest. I have had books crack #100 and lower in the whole of Amazon. Those are the ones that make you the $300+ per day.

I have not actually kept an exact count of how many books I have created. You see I have lots of side deals, sold the rights to publishers of some and all sorts of JV's and stuff, but probably about 500.

Click to expand...

Thanks for getting back to me. And wow, that's a lot of books. Congrats on all the success!

So it takes a book in the top 100 to earn $300/day off it? Is that based off a $0.99 book or a $2.99 book? I'm curious, because it looks like it would be tough to get into the top 1,000. Judging from my niche and the quality of my eBook, I'm expecting to rank anywhere from 3,000 to 30,000 for my first book.

I found the following chart (and think you even mentioned it at some point in this thread). How accurate would you say it is?

Kindle Rank --- # of eBooks sold

50,000 - 100,000 = 1/day
10,000 - 50,000 = 3 to 15/day
4,500 - 10,000 = 15 to 25/day
3,000 - 4,500 = 25 to 50/day
500 - 3,000 = 50 to 200/day

Also, what would you expect for a book ranked 10,000 - 25,000 and 25,000 to 50,000?

Kaliber45 said:

If you take your writing as a reference, I can see why you think their writing skills suck.

Click to expand...

I am not native English speaker as you can see, but i have a great editors from USA.
Bisides, even with my poor English, i can see if the writing is good or bad, it's not that complicated...

Dayspring said:

Thanks for getting back to me. And wow, that's a lot of books. Congrats on all the success!

So it takes a book in the top 100 to earn $300/day off it? Is that based off a $0.99 book or a $2.99 book? I'm curious, because it looks like it would be tough to get into the top 1,000. Judging from my niche and the quality of my eBook, I'm expecting to rank anywhere from 3,000 to 30,000 for my first book.

I found the following chart (and think you even mentioned it at some point in this thread). How accurate would you say it is?

Kindle Rank --- # of eBooks sold

50,000 - 100,000 = 1/day
10,000 - 50,000 = 3 to 15/day
4,500 - 10,000 = 15 to 25/day
3,000 - 4,500 = 25 to 50/day
500 - 3,000 = 50 to 200/day

Also, what would you expect for a book ranked 10,000 - 25,000 and 25,000 to 50,000?

Click to expand...

I'm not allowed to post links yet, but search "kindle rank calculator" in google and it's the first link, it's a decentish tool for determining sales per rank, though its pretty broad so its not 100% reliable.

Your chart is pretty accurate, it's hard to give an exact figure to ranks since it's constantly changing. 10,000-25,000 can be 10-20 a day and 25,000-50,000 is like 3-10, but it all depends

Rose111 said:

Well, i think one of the biggest problem in fiction is to find a good writer.
Out of 100 in odesk, only 3 was good enouf to keep them.

By the way, there is one thing i simple don't understand.
I see very bad writers that get's tons of work done...
I mean they work non stopped, with some repeats customers.
How the hell they make money from this shity writing?
I guess those guys just use some black hat tricks, because i have no other explanation.

Click to expand...

Rose111 I will try and answer your points again.

At this moment in time I have enough work for my team. Once I have dealt with that I will look to expand again.

In reference to working with shitty writers...

As I outlined at the outset you have to pay for good quality writers and if you cannot you have to be clever.

When I started I realised I could pay shitty writers who actually told good stories and then edit them. It is a lot easier to edit than write if you know what your doing. I can edit about 2000-3000 words per hour. So that was a great way for me to initially scale on a limited budget.

Unfortunately as you outline you are not a native English speaker so you cannot do this. Just as I could not if I wanted a book in German or Russian or Chinese or whatever as I do not speak that language fluently. So all you can do is pay someone to create the book for you. And depending on how much you pay to writers, illustrators, editors, etc will determine the quality of the book you get, as you cannot add any value to its creation.

But it is a good point you raise as it concerns a common misconception people have on BHW about outsourcing writing.

People are expecting to say to a writer "create me a fantastic book" and that is not going to happen cheaply, for 1 person to do that they have to be extremely talented and so will cost a lot of money. Break down the book into constituent parts and manage those individual parts separately, you get it a lot cheaper. Then edit it all together into a "fantastic" book.

Remember the key to a good book is a good editor.

Great editors is very important..

GringoMonkey

Yes, i agree with your points.
" I could pay shitty writers who actually told good stories and then edit them ", but even this is not so easy to find.
I mean, many of the shitty writers - have no idea how to tell a good stories. They don't understand the formula of successful book, they don't know how to build the intrigue, how to write a good cliffhanger, they never read books in the same niche and so on.

By the way, with illustrators i had much bigger luck, actually, i found a few that are cheap and very good.
With writers i pay more than average for a good one...

Please guys any tips on adding website links into the book?

Where best to place them and how to do it?

Thanks

OP: I'm still having a hard time finding profitable niches. I have 5 books released, and still only earning less than $10/month. I like to write my ebooks myself, because anything I have ever outsourced IM wise (I used to pay people to write articles for my review website), they always came back garbage. Every time. I'm willing to venture out and write about something I know nothing about and could research, but some of these top selling books seem so dull and boring. Do I really have to sell my soul just to make a real buck on amazon?

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.

Sythix said:

OP: I'm still having a hard time finding profitable niches. I have 5 books released, and still only earning less than $10/month. I like to write my ebooks myself, because anything I have ever outsourced IM wise (I used to pay people to write articles for my review website), they always came back garbage. Every time. I'm willing to venture out and write about something I know nothing about and could research, but some of these top selling books seem so dull and boring. Do I really have to sell my soul just to make a real buck on amazon?

Click to expand...

If you can write a book yourself and cost is an issue, then do it. Don't bother looking for ghostwriters until you have something that is successful and you can scale. That is ultimately the point.

From what say you don't have a successful book. Nor do you seem to know how to go about getting one. How you find them is explained on many Kindle threads here on BHW. If you still don't get it maybe this ain't for you?

The money isn't in writing the book it is in knowing what to publish. No one is going to hand you that on a plate for free.

Sythix said:

OP: I'm still having a hard time finding profitable niches. I have 5 books released, and still only earning less than $10/month. I like to write my ebooks myself, because anything I have ever outsourced IM wise (I used to pay people to write articles for my review website), they always came back garbage. Every time. I'm willing to venture out and write about something I know nothing about and could research, but some of these top selling books seem so dull and boring. Do I really have to sell my soul just to make a real buck on amazon?

Click to expand...

If the niche is not popular, with a low ranking - you will not make money.
It's as simple as that.
if all the profitable topics are out of your interest, than, yes, you have to see your soul to make a buck
The thing is...there is so many niches to chose from, maybe you just don't understand how to make niche research.

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!

And where are you selling ur ebooks guys ?