Publishing ebooks for Amazon’s Kindle reader is often being referred to as “The New Gold Rush”. But is it really that profitable? Can you really make money selling Kindle books?
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Making Money Selling Kindle Books
To talk about this field of earning, we first need to look at the underlying principles.
What you Need to Know First
Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2008. Since then, the reading device has been almost wholly to blame for the demise of regular print reading like newspapers, paperbacks, and even entire franchises like Barnes & Noble.
When Amazon did this, they also created a brand-new market known as Self Publishing, which of course started on Amazon, but has since branched out to other marketplaces like the Apple Store, Nook, and many others.
Despite all the others who have jumped on this idea of Self Publishing, Amazon continues to dominate, and therefore, Kindle Publishing is almost its own entity.
What Kindle publishing did was allow anyone who wanted to write a book, to do just that without any of the traditional gatekeepers. I took about 3 months in 2016 to write my own book. I paid someone to make a cover and format it. Boom. I was now a self-published author.
In the past, you would have to go through a series of pitches — essentially pitching your book idea to literary agents and publishing companies — in order to get a book deal. Without a book deal, you could have never published a book.
Now, instead of pitching your idea, waiting for a response, and dealing with publishing companies, all you have to do is upload a simple document. You can literally be a published author within a few hours. Even with the glory of typos, bad ideas, and poor writing, you can be an author!
How Publishing on Kindle Works
Surprisingly, publishing a book to the Amazon Kindle store is not difficult.
Once you write your book, you simply upload it to Amazon’s servers for review. Amazon uses a specific type of file called a .mobi but if you use MS Word, you can upload a simple Word document.
Besides the actual content of the book, you don’t need much else. There are some things that most kindle publishers say that you cannot do without, like professional editing.
At a bare minimum, you can publish a book with just the content and a cover.
Once the fine folks at Amazon review your book it will go live in the Kindle store, making you a published author. This simplicity is probably the reason that Kindle publishing has attracted so many independent writers. But can you really make money selling Kindle books or is it more of a novelty to be an author?
How Much Can You Make Selling Kindle Books
There are a few authors in the Kindle publishing world that are well-known for their success. Names like Steve Scott or Hugh Howey come to mind immediately. Both of these authors publish Kindle books and are transparent about their earnings.
Steve Scott has gone on many podcasts and showed his earnings, which average out to about $40,000 per month. Hugh Howey, the author of the best-selling, Wool series, has received offers from Hollywood to turn his book into a movie.
In this video below, you can see that Nick Stephenson is making $15,000 per month from self-publishing.
So can you make money with Kindle? Wow. YES. It’s definitely possible to make money publishing Kindle books.
The questions we have to answer now are:
- HOW do you make money selling Kindle Books?
- How do YOU get started (or improve current sales)?
- Do you have the GUTS to follow through and make this happen?
What are the Downsides to Selling on Kindle?
Let’s shake out the “get rich quick” crowd right now. Despite the many positive things about Kindle publishing, there are a few potentially deal-breaking caveats to consider.
The money is there, no doubt. But what does it take to get that money?
In 2013, Digital Book World published this report, which shows average income for self-published authors being around $5,000 per year. $5k a year is not an income, but it’s money, and it’s a good enough start for most.
Still, that number ranges from $1 to $5,000, meaning it could fall in the hundreds of dollars per year with their books. Authors making anything over $10,000 per year fall under 10% TOTAL of all writers worldwide. To really make an income, you have to be in the top 10% of self-published writers.
There are many ways to make it to 10%. You could publish more than anyone else, or better than anyone else. If you have enough money, you could just outsource better than anyone else. Just keep in mind that you are going to have to grind to make it to the top. If you love writing, you’re already halfway there.
A One-and-Done Attitude won’t Cut it
Popular advice seems to be that you need to publish multiple books in order to see any kind of tangible success. The hosts of the popular, Self-Publishing podcast, recommend a system that requires at least eight books. They have even written their own book on the topic, titled, “Write, Publish, Repeat”.
Depending on how fast you can type, and how many book ideas you have, the idea of writing eight books minimum could be a real shot to the gut. There are many authors with much more than eight books who claim to still be missing out on the success they had hoped for. One such author is Garrett Robinson.
Garrett has more than thirty books for sale in the Kindle store, yet he claims to make less than $300 per month from them. It’s worth mentioning that Garrett has a fairly large following too.
Perhaps he’s talking about the residual income part, and he makes more money during a book launch.
When I published my first (and only so far) Kindle book called Money Blog, I was able to earn about $100 per month for about six months. It’s since fallen to about $30-$50 per month. Even with 37 natural reviews accumulated so far, and a 5-star rating, I can definitely see the attrition of earnings over time, so I imagine that if you have books in obscure niches, they may earn just a few dollars per month after a few years.
I should mention, that I also have an email list where I promote the book, so that could account for the monthly sales. Without your own website and mailing list, long term sales are going to be a tough nut to crack.
Here’s an example from an experienced Amazon seller, and successful Kindle Author. You can see his earnings on Upfuel, but here’s the snapshot I’ll use to make my point.
What earns about $5k in the first year, peters out to just a few hundred dollars. Plus, even though $5k is a nice chunk of money, it’s not an income, let alone a stable one according to Chris Guthrie’s experience.
Here are my own results over time:
Kindle Early Earnings (first year of release)
Kindle Earnings Recently (after 1.5 years)
What’s the #1 Problem with Selling Kindle Books?
The truth is, it isn’t easy to market books (just ask traditional publishers). And when you call something a “Goldrush” on the internet you’re going to attract everyone! Because of that, the Kindle store has been bombarded with new books, now hosting more than 3.6 million titles.
Simply writing a book and publishing does nothing to help you sell it. You are nothing more than one small cover in a pool of over three million others.
If you want to make money selling Kindle books then you are going to have to learn to market both the books and yourself as a writer.
The most popular way, of course, is starting a blog. It only seems natural that a person making money from writing would market themselves in the same way, by writing a blog. But remember, time spent blogging, is the time taken away from writing books.
Not to mention the estimated 152 million blogs there are online.
Blogging is blogging. It’s not marketing. If you’re going to build an audience of readers and sell books you’re going to have to do more than that. You are going to need to learn how to leverage traffic from your blog to sell books.
Steve Scott, who’s marketing plan generates tens of thousands of dollars each month, uses a combination of blogging, email marketing, and even PPC (pay per click) campaigns to market his books.
There are websites, podcasts, and of course, books dedicated to helping authors learn to market their books, but there is one in particular that I feel can help more than any other. If you want to learn to be a power marketer, this is the place to start.
Make Money Selling Kindle Books
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Final Review
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Nathaniell
What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!
Can You Really Earn Money Browsing The Web?
Kyle
Your content needs editing. If you are interested in attracting a wider readership and better advertisers, you’ll either need to up your grammar game yourself or hire someone to edit your posts. I’m a copyeditor. Shoot me an email if you are interested.
Nathaniell
Ya ya. I know I’m a terrible speller and I could edit more. I’m not that worried about it, as I get the point across and people forgive my mistakes. Or perhaps this is a spam comment and you are just trying to get business. lol
Rick Jantz
Great post with a lot of great info. Here are a couple of other points:
1) Pay for a professionally designed cover. On Amazon, a book is judged by its cover.
2) Another way to generate sales is to find a good book promoter. I have two books up and paid 250 a month to my promoter. By month four I was making well over 2,000 a month. I’m not sure everything my promoter did but I’d say he more than paid for himself.
3) Write well. There’s a lot of “garbage” on Amazon from people wanting to make a fast buck. If you need to, take a writing class or search for reputable writing books; there are lots out there. Tell a good story…and make me want to buy your next book.
Nathaniell
As someone that’s published several novels on Amazon, I really appreciate your tips Rick! I had never considered getting a promoter for a book because I didn’t know they exist. I actually have a book in the works and will definitely take your advice and hire a promoter. Come to think of it, I may need to get a new cover based on what you said. I got one done at fiverr, but maybe I can get something better done.
Catch you later man. Good luck on your next novel!
Cena
Hi Rick, it will be great if you can create a course on your Kindle jorney using WA trainning platform. It will be useful for WA members to learn and as well for us to bring you visitors who like to more on Kindle
Cena
Andrés Zamora
Hello Rick can you recommend me your book promoter, its very hard to find a promoter to help with my book promotion.
Thanks
Melanie`
Great article and the comment from Rick Jantz also was great information, thank you!
K
GREAT ADVICE, cannot go much wrong following this.
Joe
Do you have that promoters name and number?
Nathaniell
The guy’s name was Nick Whale. I got some great advice and strategy ideas from him, but didn’t see much action in terms of boosting book sales from promotions. Just my personal experience.
Marc Parsons
Hey Nathaniell
Your post really helped confirm a few things and brought to light a few more for me. I have been playing with the thought of trying to make money selling my own kindle book for a while now.
My take on the Amazon scene is quite simple. If people can make great money selling match sticks or toothpicks, then it must be possible to make money selling anything, especially online!
The key though, as you mentioned, is driving ENOUGH traffic and being able to convert that traffic successfully enough to reach your targets. Doesn’t matter how great your product is, if no one knows about it or feels it will not offer them enough value, it will not sell.
In my opinion, a blog or website is definitely a great way to do this, especially if you love writing anyway. You can easily target your books niche and drive campaigns like Steve Scott does to increase conversions.
Best part about a blog for me is that my readers are in direct contact with me and are not ‘Amazon’s leads’. This means that through email marketing I have a far greater chance at making additional money by promoting my second book or another product that compliments my initial sale.
So I guess Amazon won’t be getting any ‘exclusive’ rights from me 😉
Great post and well worth the read.
Keep up the awesome work!
Cheers,
Marc Parsons
Nathaniell
In addition to what you said, I think a lot of the major success stories you read about online were due to luck, rather than hard work. Most real business owners have to grind for a long period of time before they can see consistent and growing earnings. The ‘million dollar book sales’ stories are usually people that were discovered by accident IMO. Not to say the work wasn’t good to begin with, but most people are just going to have to put in the hours to see results.
Awesome point about not just generating leads for Amazon. It’s important to retain those customers for yourself as well! Instead of just selling a book, you can sell a book, and possibly get a customer for LIFE for your business.
Leo Emery
Hey Nathaniell,
I tossed the idea around doing the Kindle thing. And the more I thought about it the less I liked the idea.
Even I got a little caught up in the dream of “sure I’ll write a book, use the power of amazon and boom I’ll make some money”
Yeah not so much. there’s a lot more to it than that.
What you mentioned makes more sense to me. Have your site, promote it there and build that following, even sales. And then if you want move onto Amazon with that behind you. Now you have some momentum.
I think just relying on Amazon to be your promoter is not wise, you need to expand and reach out and let people know about your work.
I think a lot of people that have jumped on the self publishing bandwagon probably got a real reality check of just how difficult it can be to make money selling books.
No matter what you want to sell, you need that solid foundation of how marketing online works. Once you have that, then you can literally sell anything – book or no book.
Thanks for the great post, always love reading your stuff, even if it’s not your own book – LOL
Cheers
Leo
Nathaniell
The other great thing about having your own website is that you are not relying on one platform you have no control over in order to make money through your writing. Amazon may decide one day to start paying less, or change something that totally screws up the income you expected to keep coming in. When you have more control over your branding, your business is more stable.
That means if things go south on Amazon you still have traffic and a following through your website that you can now direct to Nook, iBooks, Clickbank, or even just a plain old PDF download and a Paypal transaction. You also have the option to do paid or free advertising.
I would have never thought that publishing a book and getting it noticed would be possible for me until I started learning online marketing and learned about things like finding a ‘niche audience’, creating a sales funnel, and using email marketing to foster customer relationships. Anyway, it’s just an exciting way to grow any business, including Amazon Kindle writing.
Thanks for reading Leo. Catch you later!
Kathy
Nathaniell
I enjoyed this post because I am interested in self-publishing some books (as soon as I get them done). Back in June 2015, I went ahead and set a book up on Amazon Kindle.Today was the last day for it on Kindle Select. I didn’t sell any. It was a short book of poetry which I don’t think really sells well, anyway. But I tried. I unpublished it because I didn’t feel it was my best work. I may try again with another project, but I’m not sure if it will be with Amazon Kindle.
Nathaniell
You should definitely republish it! You never know who’s eye it will catch. One (kind of) secret that a lot of writers don’t know is that most people who make income from writing do not to it with one smash hit. They write consistently over a period of time, and build a large library of books. The same thing happens with music. Over time, you collect a large amount of small sales numbers and in volume they add up to bigger sales numbers.
You could also join some poetry communities, social groups, or forums and see how other people are marketing their work.
Also, you don’t have to publish exclusively to Amazon Kindle. They have some deals where you can publish just for them and get better placement/earnings, but you also have the option to publish in multiple places, namely Nook and iBooks.