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A Review of My Amazon eBook Sales After One Month

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So it’s been approximately one month since I started selling my two ebooks on Amazon – 1,699 Nonfiction Writing Prompts and How to Write Blog Posts that Sell eBooks. I didn’t quite hit the 3 figure sales mark. I was pretty darn close, but not quite there. This means I sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-something ebooks on Amazon last month.

It’s not great, but it ain’t bad either. In my last post, you’ll recall that I led you to the Reddit thread where an anonymous author spilled his Amazon sales secrets. Coincidentally, he didn’t break the three figure sales mark until his second month either. When he was in his eighth month he did over $20K. In other words, don’t let the first month become a marker for your potential.

From this first month I discovered one very essential point worth mentioning. Marketing really and truly DOES make a difference. How do I know? Because when I was actively marketing my ebooks, I generated way more sales than when I wasn’t doing any marketing. It was as obvious as the nose on my face!

Case in point, over the past couple of weeks I had been working on some new ebooks. When I’m deeply entrenched in writers mode, I tend to do less marketing.

This is especially true because I’ve been writing fiction, which is a major switch up from my typical nonfiction fare. It definitely was a week or starts and stops while I got my Stephen King mind lathered up. I’m still carefully taking each step, though as I progress through the story I’m feeling my confidence rise.

In any case, with more fiction writing and less nonfiction marketing, I did see my Amazon sales suffer.

This tells me that if you’re not going to publish a large body of ebooks on Amazon, you definitely need to have a marketing plan in place. You need to be soliciting reviews and writing articles and whatnot.

That’s not to say that you won’t get sales without marketing. Yes… I did generate some sales without doing any promotional work those last two weeks of May. But the difference between the marketing intense weeks and non-marketing intense weeks was extraordinarily noticeable.

A word about the KDP Select Program

When you upload your ebook to Amazon, they offer you the opportunity to enroll in the KDP Select Program. KDP Select enables customers enrolled in the Amazon Prime program (which I believe is only available in the US), to borrow an ebook once a month with no due date.

If a customer opts to borrow your ebook you get a percentage of a the Lending Library Fund.

According to the KDP Select Frequently Asked Questions:

“Your share of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Fund is calculated based on a share of the total number of qualified borrows of all participating KDP titles. For example, if the monthly fund amount is $500,000, the total qualified borrows of all participating KDP titles is 100,000, and your book was borrowed 1,500 times, you will earn 1.5% (1,500/100,000 = 1.5%), or $7,500 for that month.”

In addition to the Lending Library perk, you also receive up to five days to do a freebie promotion. This means you can give your ebook away for five days (non consecutively or consecutively, whatever you wish).

This giveaway strategy doesn’t seem to work for people who have only one ebook.

The supposed power behind it is if you have several ebooks, like a mystery series, then you give away the first one in hopes that people will purchase the other titles in your series.

Initially I did enroll in KDP Select. When you do Amazon gives you the option to back out of the program within a few days, provided you don’t use any of your giveaway days. In the end, I un-enrolled my titles.

Why I did NOT take the KDP Select bait

  1. Well the most obvious reason is that I didn’t have enough titles within a series to make it worth my while. If I gave away one, it was a crap shoot whether someone would have purchased the other.
  2. Many authors say they enroll in KDP Select to get reviews, but that’s not a guarantee either. I’ve seen plenty of authors give away thousands of copies of their ebooks and not get a single review from the deal. At the end of the day, that’s a bitter pill to swallow.
  3. Although there was the possibility of getting a piece of the Lending Library pie, there’s no guarantee you’ll earn anything from that one either.
  4. Plus – and this is one of the biggest reasons why I didn’t stay enrolled in KDP Select – you must remain in the program for three months. Within that time you cannot sell your ebook anywhere else except Amazon.

That’s a problem for me. What if you get into KDP Select and realize your ebook just doesn’t sell on Amazon. Now you have to wait three months to get out of the contract. Sure, at that point you can sell your ebook elsewhere. But you also have to take into consideration that it takes two months to get paid from these other ebook stores.

That means it could be FIVE months (ouch!) before you really start seeing any type of real profits from an ebook. Those odds just aren’t strong enough for me to take the bait just yet.

I’m not saying that I’ll never enroll an ebook into KDP Select. I just won’t do it right now. I won’t even consider it until I have a series of titles to speak of. I’d rather take my chances being able to sell on multiple sites.

What I’ve planned for June

More marketing. Lots more marketing. (See my eBook Marketing Journal blog for those updates.)

Plus I’ll be putting at least two fiction stories up for sale. Not full fledged novels, but short stories.

Someone asked me if if customers get pissed paying for short stories. Actually no, they don’t.

I read both novels and short stories, but I prefer short stories. I hear short stories are popular with commuters. I hear people like to read them during their lunch breaks. I read short stories while I’m doing the laundry.

Amazon has a category for short stories. Plus, you can mention in your book description that your title is a short story. I strongly recommend you do just that to appeal to people looking specifically for shorter tomes.

If you haven’t gotten into your ebook writing groove, now’s the time to get going. This isn’t a guarantee of a million dollars overnight, but it is a simple way to build up a business that will continue to support for years to come. Don’t wait. Just get started. Now.

Filed Under: The eBook Hustle Tagged With: , ,

eBook Sales Advice from an Anonymous Mentor

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A few weeks ago I came across a thread on Reddit that both validates the things I talk about on this blog and shows exactly what can be done when you stay the course. It’s a pretty long thread, going through the ins and out’s of how this author started making $1K a day selling ebooks on Amazon.

The author doesn’t disclose his true identity, but knowing what I know about the ebook selling business his words ring true. 

Here’s a summary of some of the main points:

$.99 Isn’t necessarily the sweet pricing spot everyone thinks it is
Though a lot of author have this $.99 Amazon pricing mentality, this author says that he does the bulk of his sales at $2.99.

For nonfiction books (which is currently the bulk of what I sell) this is very doable. As I said last week, I think you can go even higher for nonfiction (especially how to stuff) and still get sales.

I’m just beginning to dabble in fiction, so I can’t speak with absolute authority just yet.

I read fiction though, and I don’t automatically gravitate towards the $.99 titles any more. I have a bunch of $.99 titles and an even larger bunch of freebie Kindle books. A lot of them are just plain horrible.

If consumers are getting the impression that the really cheap ebooks are of substandard quality, it’s just a matter of time before sales become minimal. In that case it makes sense to start pricing at $2.99.

Sales come from five key areas
According to the anonymous author these would include: the cover, description, ranking, title and reference.  (He goes into depth about reference in the thread. Very helpful stuff.)

Although I see some decent covers on Amazon, there’s an unbelievable amount of poorly written 1-2 sentence descriptions. It’s like the authors just get burned out at the tail end of the process and just throw up whatever when they’re uploading the book.

Your Amazon sales copy isn’t exactly a long form sales letter, but it should be more than a random sentence or two. This is especially true if you expect to generate sales directly through Amazon and not from your own marketing efforts.

The better you merchandise your ebook on Amazon, the better your sales. It’s really just that simple.

Yup… it’s all about volume
Said author has over 100 ebooks on Amazon, most of them are 10 pages or less. Only a handful are actual novels.

His financial yield? As of six months ago, $22K a month.

Here… don’t worry, I’ll say it for you – DAAAAMMMNNNN! If you can sit still for a 20 good hours a week you can do three 10 page documents. It takes practice in the beginning, but it gets easier the more you do it.

You might liken me to a broken record, but I keep telling you that volume is where it’s at. This is really apparent on Amazon.

Marketing is a moot point
I think you should do some marketing, but anonymous author says that if you have enough volume, your books start generating traffic for each other.

I find this to be entirely true because I’ve seen it happen right here on this very blog.

A customer will order one ebook, then come back for a second and often a third. A nice percentage of my sales come from repeat buyers. My priority is just getting customers into the funnel.

Fortunately when you’re selling ebooks on Amazon you’re already in a location where traffic is abundant. The funnel is ready to go. You just need to make sure that your cover, title, description and whatnot are all in order.

The first six months were s-l-o-w
Oh gosh, this isn’t something we get rich quick brethern like to dwell upon.

If you’re anything like me, you want that first ebook to go up, and be able to start planning your round-the-world trip within the next month. Anonymous author said that it took him a good six months to start seeing results worthy of a happy dance.

But it may not take you as long. He claims that over time he started doing better covers, better titles, and just improved the output of his work.

If you go into this process with the mentality that you’re going to do great work from the beginning, then you can cut that learning curve in half.

Want to see more of anonymous authors advice?

Read the entire Reddit post here. It’s truly an education.

Filed Under: The eBook Hustle Tagged With: , , ,

What Do You Do When Nobody Buys Your eBook?

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By sharing my experiences here and at eBook Marketing Journal, my goal is to give you a brutally honest look at what it takes to make a living selling ebooks online. It’s not always a million dollar experience. Sometimes it’s not even a thousand dollar experience.

We always hear these stories about how a couple of ‘absolute newbies’ stumble onto the scene and make $16,237 within 27 days. (Rule #8 of Internet Marketing Copywriting: Be precise!)

I’m not here to smash that reality. Absolute newbies DO stumble in and make $16,237 within 27 days. Trust me, I’ve seen much bigger dollar amounts first hand. But this is truly one of those “your results may vary” type of situations.

Most people struggle to get those first 100 sales. They get discouraged along the way because they’re not one of those absolute newbies with the five figure PayPal screenshots.

Hell, I’ve been there. If you read my posts from early last year then you know I was an A1 flop for longer than I cared to admit. Check out eBook Marketing Journal and you’ll see that I still singe a few hairs from time to time.

How do you make it right?

First, have a good hearty laugh at the whole internet marketing industry.

Second, realize that my results, other peoples results and your results will all be totally different creatures. Your skills are very different than mine. And people who I admire have very different strengths than mine.

Third, realize that time and timing have a lot to do with where you are.

I hang out with a lot of Amazon Kindle authors, and the general consensus is that the first movers made a lot more money a year or so ago – with fewer books – than they do today. There were fewer self-publishers back then.

Now that doesn’t mean you can’t make a small fortune selling ebooks on Amazon. There are authors who started less than a year ago and are cleaning up there.

It just means that the strategy you read about a year ago might not be the same thing that’s gonna get you to the promise land today. As soon as you come to that conclusion you’ll be ready to move on to…

The 3 eBook marketing strategies for sellers suffering in silence

1) Volumize. The days of “I’m-gonna-make-$100K-from-this-ONE-ebook” are not as prolific as they used to be. One ebook probably isn’t going to be your savior. Two ebooks,? Nah! Three ebooks? Keep going. FOUR ebooks? Okay, now you’re getting into the comfort zone.

In Creating eBooks that are Impulse Buyer Magnets I say you should write no fewer than four ebooks for a given niche if you really want to maximize your profits.

With four ebooks you easily attract repeat buyers. Your average sale amount is higher. And at that point you’re more easily perceived as an expert rather than a fly-by-nighter. That type of status IS a major selling point.

If you read John Locke’s How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! one of things he advocates is volume. You don’t even have to read it. Just look at the number of titles he’s got up and running on Amazon.

I just read a story from an author who has over 100 titles up on Amazon. He said he didn’t even break the triple digits (per month) until around month three. At month eight, he earned over $20K.

Mind you, these aren’t 200 page ebooks, either. The vast majority are short stories. Piddly little things that are 10 pages or less! Surely they’re not award winners, but he has volume on his side.

You will never understand the sheer power of volume until you’re knee deep in it.

2) Promote like a barracuda. Though you may want to throw in the towel, the worst thing you can do is stop marketing. I’ve seen the most gosh awful ebooks do tremendously well, not for their literary value, but because the author was a marketing barracuda.

You just have to do a little bit each day. Guest blogging. Blog commenting. Twitter. Building a blog. Lots of tiny little steps accumulate over time.

I just said it the other day… when I started writing on Squidoo, I really had to hustle to see the sales come in. I wanted to give up after the third article because traffic was so dismal.

Now with 14 articles (and growing) at Squidoo, ebook sales come in on their own. You just have to keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. And most important, don’t stop.

3) Be everywhere. As soon as my first ebook went up Amazon, I noticed an immediate uptick of ebook sales here (on this blog).

Seems a bit counter-intuitive considering my Amazon ebooks are only priced at $2.99, and everything here is $10-$20. But I don’t sell all of my ebooks on Amazon. (A strategy I decided to experiment with.)

So if someone wants Impulse Buyer Magnets, they’ve gotta get it here. This helps me to sustain during the lean times while I’m building my Amazon empire. I know that I’m getting sales on Amazon and because of Amazon.

Now I don’t think this particular strategy would work if I were selling fiction only. But for nonfiction (which I know many of you reading this blog focus on), it’s golden.

 

Filed Under: The eBook Hustle Tagged With: , ,
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