How to Kindle a DIY publishing business – Page 2 of 2 – StartupSmart
This all takes time and money, which small business owners don’t have much of. Why is it worth the effort?
Some businesses are making $2,000 a day on top of what they already make. After that initial effort, you just let it be published and it can sit there without much further work.
Every business needs marketing, whether you’re a physical store or an online business. This is just one more way to do it and you should be able to carve out the time.
If you’re making even $200 a day, it’s a bit of a no brainer. That’s why so many people are saying ‘bye bye’ to their literary agent and publisher and doing it themselves, because they can control it all.
The traditional publishers are very scared of this. Penguin recently signed an author for a seven-figure sum and told her, as is the norm, that she will have to go out and promote the book herself.
She said that she was going to put an old book of hers on the Kindle, in order to generate interest for the new Penguin book.
Penguin said that she had violated her contract and sued her – they are that scared of Kindle. Amazon then stepped in, settled the case for her and signed her as an author. She’s now selling books via them.
Publishers are dinosaurs. Amazon did it backwards compared to the publishers – it is a sales and marketing channel that is now a publisher, rather than the other way around.
But how can you stand out from the crowd if everyone else is doing this? It sounds like a market that’s set to be saturated, if it’s not already.
Well, you need to change your thinking as a business from being product first to being customer first.
You need to think of the buyer and go from there. You can pick any micro niche that already has some titles in it that are selling and do some demographic research. If the reader is typically a 25 to 35-year-old college educated woman earning $100,000 a year, you need to gear the book to them.
Find out what people want and get it ghost written. It’s not a huge investment.
Make sure you offer good, original content and try to price it between $2.99 and $9.99 – that is the usual sweet spot and you get charged more in commission if you go above or below this.
You can cover art work for $200, depending on how much you want going, and you can upload it to Amazon or iBooks for zero cost.
To drive traffic, you can use a blog or a Facebook fan page. These things cost nothing. We haven’t had this kind of opportunity to reach people with products, for this cost, before.
How do you see this space developing in the next few years?
Last May, Amazon said that it is now selling 105 Kindle eBooks for every 100 printed books, so this area is growing very quickly.
The traditional publishers have been completely circumvented, so the barriers have come down. Anyone who can spot an opportunity and is smart enough about it can make money by self-publishing. It’s strange – even five years ago, that would’ve been such a strange thing to say.