Can you guarantee that books I self publish on Kindle will make money?
The truth is, getting your book written, formatted, and self-published on Kindle is the easy part. You can outsource a great deal of that work to other people, and these steps just have to be done once. After your Kindle book goes live, the real work begins.
marketing your book requires you to be organized and persistent. There are several channels you can use to get the word out about your book, and I recommend using as many of those channels as you can manage. Yes, this part of the project can get tedious and frustrating. But when it works, you will start to see a light at the end of the tunnel. You will gain confidence in yourself and your ability to make money online.
One of the factors that boosts Kindle book sales is having lots of good reviews, but this creates a catch-22. Ideally, your reviews will come from people who have downloaded your book. So how do you gather reviews without making any sales? Keep reading to learn some tried-and-true marketing shortcuts I’ve learned through my own Kindle self-publishing experiences.
Free Promotions on Kindle
Once your Kindle book is active, one of the first things to do is make sure it’s enrolled for KDP Select. This will allow Amazon Prime members to “borrow” your book – and yes, you will get paid when members borrow your title.
Another Kindle promotion you can do is to offer the title for free for up to five days. This can be a fast and easy way to gather a bunch of reviews right off the bat. Share the link to the free download with your friends, family, co-workers, your barber, your high school baseball coach – anyone you can come up with who might be willing to read through your book and leave a review.
Kindle Directories
The next step is to get your book promoted on some Kindle book directories. Using directories is another free and easy way to spread the word about your new book. Tons of people subscribe to these directories so that they can take advantage of Kindle’s many freebies. You can do a quick Google search for free Kindle directories, and simply submit your title to each site.
Promoting Kindle Books on Social Media
Social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook make it really easy to share your new self-published Kindle book with your friends and family. But there are also some easy ways to use these tools to reach a much wider audience with your book. For example, sending a quick tweet to @kindlefreebook will provide a link to your free book to the account’s 35,000 followers. Pretty easy, right?
There are many similar pages on Facebook as well. You can share a link to your free book on those pages to round up even more book reviews. Always remember to include a link to the free download, plus the dates during which the book will be free. In addition, you could try setting up a Facebook Ad to see how many more sales and downloads you can get. I suggest you try running a campaign without ads to see what kind of organic response you get.
Message Boards and Forums
There are probably widespread communities of people discussing the very topics covered in your book. These clubs, organizations, and associations often use online forums to conduct their topical chats. When these forums are open to the public, you can easily share your book on those message boards. Just do a quick Google search for “forum: (your keyword)” to find those forums best suited for your ideal audience.
Remember to check back on the forum to see if people have questions or comments for you. Engaging with this audience in a positive or helpful way will help ensure that this effort will result in more downloads and reviews.
Got Some Amazon Reviews?
Once your book has six verified reviews (those are posted by people who actually downloaded your book), you will be able to increase the price of your book. Your royalty percentage will also go up. This is the first benchmark you have to reach in order to make real money with Kindle. Ideally, all of this promotion during the five-day free promotion will push you over the threshold.
Putting your book out there for the world to consume is a scary thing. And unfortunately, I can practically guarantee that you will receive a negative review at some point. Some people simply need to complain or badmouth other people’s work – it’s just the way the world works.
But you will also get some bad reviews that you should view as constructive criticism. Much of the seemingly negative comments are really feedback that you should use to improve your Kindle book. Remember: it’s your book. You can deactivate, edit, re-format, and re-publish it any time you want. And if that’s what you need to do in order for it to make you money, then that’s what you do.
In the meantime, there is one easy thing you can do to move negative reviews to the bottom of your list of reviews. Under each review, you will see the comment “Was this review helpful to you?” Just click NO for negative reviews, and click YES for positive reviews. This will move the positive ones to the top, and the negative ones to the bottom. The more positive your reviews look, the better your book will rank on Amazon – and that’s really what these promotions are all about.
There are a hundred other ways to help promote your Kindle book, increase sales, and gather reviews. These are the big techniques that every Kindle author needs to use in order to start making money from their book. They are the steps I follow to make sure that each of my self-published Kindle books continues to make me money.
Let me be clear: I make a lot of money doing this. I have an automated system that guarantees that new books get published, and that all of my books sell well.
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