I think the KDP (kindle direct publishing) is a great way to bring in some extra cash and make a decent side income if you have a knack for writing. I’m going to be focusing on fiction here but a lot of this applies to nonfiction as well. Though the best way to use a nonfiction book is as a lead magnet to sell higher priced items like coaching. But regardless let’s talk about how to make a nice side income using KDP and your own writing skills.
I’m going to assume you’re at least a little familiar with KDP so that this article doesn’t get bogged down in definitions and common knowledge, I want to get right to the point. So to start Amazon has two different royalty rates for your books as of this writing. If you price you’re book anywhere under 2.99 or over 9.99 you get 35% of the cost. Whereas if you price in that 2.99-9.99 range you get 70% royalty.
So selling a book at 2.99 nets you 2.09 per sale. Whereas if you price at 2.98 you’ll get 1.04 per sale. A huge difference. But let’s stretch this out. To make the same for a sale of 9.99 book, which nets you 6.99. You’d have to sell a book at roughly 20. Twice the price to net the same amount of money. Obviously that’ll never work. So we need to focus on 2.99-9.99 range.
The Length Of Your Book And Pricing Considerations
The more quality books you can put up the more money you’ll make, all else being even. With that being said different length books are sold for different prices. Anything under 50,000 words, at least in fiction, gets sold for 2.99 and lower. To get a 4.99 price you want to be in the 50-75k range. To go above that you have to hit 85-100k. Again this is for fiction, nonfiction changes depending on the specialization of the information you’re presenting, competition, and then book length.
So for fiction you want to focus in that sweet spot of 50-75 thousand words. That gives you the best bang for your time invested, that range has the highest ROI. And since you’re going to want to churn out twenty or so books before seeing real money being made, this keeps you from working on that 200,000 word epic that you won’t be ready to write anyways. Start with simply, singular POV 50-75k word stories. That’ll make up the majority of your first twenty books.
You Must Write In A Series
Trilogies are the bare minimum but I’d recommend hitting series of 5-7 books. The reason being when advertising, which you will have to do, you generally lose money of the first book. The real money is made through the read through. Which is someone buying book one, liking it, then buying book two, three, four, and so on and so fourth. I can’t remember the source but I remember hearing that the average series doesn’t start making money until the fourth book. Therefore having a series of 5-7 books make sense.
And to get to your 20 book base level goal, you’ll have to keep writing after this but at this point you’ll start seeing your labor pay off, you need 4 series. That’s making four worlds or one world with four interconnected stories. Though you don’t have to make all the series in the same world it’s a good idea to make them related. If only by subgenre. Which is another important topic. You have to write in same sub genre. You can’t do thrillers, historical fiction, and science fiction having one series of each.
You have to stick with one genre, sub-genre preferably. So that means writing thrillers and crime stories won’t work, neither will writing fantasy and science fiction. Pick one and stick with it. You shouldn’t even do epic fantasy and dark fantasy, stick to one and keep doing it. Why it’s so important to pick the right genre front the start. If you’ve already started then just make use of what you have and go forward with this in mind.
Other Considerations For Selling 10 Books A Day On KDP
So we’re shooting for ten books a day, at 2.99 that’s 20.90 a day or around 630 a month or 7,628.50 a year, which for a side income isn’t that bad. Can certainly make a difference in your life, that much is certain. Now aside from producing book after book, and realizing you’ll need around twenty to start seeing a decent income as well as understanding writing in a series of 5-7 books and all in the same genre, what else do we need to do?
The first is have a way to retain customers and a email list is the best way to do this. Make sure that you have a place for your readers to sign up to your email list and make sure that you’re keeping in contact with them through a newsletter. You can do weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly but don’t go longer than that. But let’s talk about when you first put your books up, what are your options are to get to ten books a day, because it’s not going to happen on its own.
There are a couple of options here. There are deal sites like BookBub, Robin Reads, and the like. And they’re great…once you have the right amount of reviews. Once the reviews are there I highly recommend testing these sites out. BookBub is the big one and you’ll not likely get it right away but the others are doable, here’s a good list of these sites. Check them out. But again, that’s once you have reviews, so what to do until then?
One idea is to do an internet search for people who do reviews in your genre and reach out to them. Tell them you just wrote a book in whatever genre it’s in and if they’d like to do a review. As always be professional and courteous both when asking and when you get whatever the answer is.
And then of course there’s Amazon ads. Don’t just start these blind either read a few books about how they work and how to maximize them or take a course on them, because if you don’t know what you’re doing you can lose money fast. But once your stuff is up they’re a good way to send people to get and get those couple of reviews so you can start to use the other sites.
A Somewhat Steep Learning Curve But A Good Side Income
Becoming a self-published author takes a lot of knowledge and understanding and then a lot of work. But it’s a great way to make a decent side income and get extra cash in the bank. And if you write good books and do the above you set yourself up for making the most money from this. Don’t forget ads and promotional sites will take money and you may lose a little more than you spend when starting out.
But once you get over that beginner’s hurdle and iron things out are reliable ways to keep making money and bringing people into your work. If no one knows who you are, no matter how well written your books are you can’t make money. Some publish frequently and runs promotions. Try to write at least 1,000 words a day if you can, though some will have to do a little less. Regardless make sure you write every day.
And step by step, brick by brick, you’ll accomplish the goal of selling 10 books a day on KDP.
If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it.
-Charles Sledge
