Amazon Kindle publishing is growing like wildfire all across the world. Independent authors (Indies) are rising from various aspects of life to publish books and are making quite a lot of money from doing so.
A few Nigerians have caught up to this trend as well, but very few have had any worthwhile results, and most of them start preaching that Amazon Kindle is a waste of time.
This could not be farther away from the truth. The reason most people aren’t having success is simply because they are thinking as plain writers, not marketers.
Your number one goal on kindle is to sell. That’s it, even if you’re trying to change the world with your books, if no one buys it, it’s a complete waste of hours, time and energy.
Understanding the how, the what, and the reason why people buy is just as important as your story. Neglecting the marketing aspect of your book and thinking that just publishing on amazon will bring riches is the beginning of failure.
If you think it’s all about writing some African love story or poem and publishing it on amazon, and then sitting back relaxing and sipping a cup of tea while the riches come, I assure you you’ll be sitting for a very long time.
I have published 6 books on Amazon and I’ve had good success with it and I can tell you the first thing to understand about publishing on Amazon is you don’t write what you feel like writing, or from your gut.
That’s why I have listed 6 top guidelines to ensure you’re successful on amazon publishing:
Tip 1: Research great keywords You write what people are searching for.
Why? Because it’s all about value and people might not need your Nigerian love poem or story.
So how do we know what people need? By knowing what they are searching for.
A great tool to use to determine how what people are searching for is Google Keyword planner. If we want to write a book on productivity we can head over to google keyword planner and do a search for productivity in the workplace, we will see that in the U.S over 390 people per month are searching for keywords relating to productivity.
Just like Google ranking and SEO, you need to make sure you have chosen exciting keywords for the title of your book that people are searching for. If you want to write a book on “How to be productive in the workplace” for example, your major keyword here is productivity, so you can search on Amazon’s website and check the books under productivity.
Another sub-tip is to put the major keyword in front of the book. For our book we can name it, “Productive tips: being a world-class employee”, it really works and people see you more.Tip 2: Track your Writing I have to confess, I love writing, I write nothing less than 1000 words per day, it’s a math game for me, most of my books are writing the 10,000 words range, so if I write for ten days, I’ll have my first draft, granted it’s something I’m very knowledgeable about and needs little research. So I keep track of my words per hour ratio and I put it all in an excel template. This way I track my speed every single day, up until recently I clock 1200 words per hour on average, I’m still trying to beat my time.
Tip 3: You don’t have to write your books So you have a great idea for a book, and you don’t have the time to write it, you can head over to upwork.com and hire a ghost writer for $100 to help you out. You can hire freelancers to design your cover on fiverr.com and also if you are like me and you like an excellent work done, you can hire an editor to proofread and check your book, trust me, it works and gives your book an extra edge.
Tip 4: How do you research and know hot-selling topics on Amazon Kindle? First thing is to just model what works. Amazon has best sellers for each category, you can model (not directly copy) those books; the topics, the title, the design, the description (copy) and more. You can do it in a mechanical way, maybe have a spreadsheet where you put the name of the best seller titles and the links.
Another major thing I do to gauge the hotness of my topic is searching for the major keyword on Amazon and seeing how the top books under that keyword are doing.So for example if I want to write on “Growing your business exponentially” my major keywords are business growth. I’ll just type that under Amazon and check out the books that pop out.
Questions to ask yourself are How many copies have they sold? What’s their ranking?
You can also use Google keywords to gauge the search strength for that topic, if a lot of people are searching for it, then you know you have a great book.TIP 5: How do you get paid? Amazon does not allow a Nigerian account to register. What you can do is use a Payoneer account to open a U.S. account and register and receive cash through your Payoneer card.
All you need to register on Amazon from Payoneer is your routing number, your account name, and bank number.
Login to your Payoneer account online, click on global payment services and you will see all the information you need to register on Amazon.
TIP 6 – How do you make your books sell? I saved the best tip for last; I’ve noticed that sales on Amazon are directly related to my reviews. The more balanced reviews you can get for your book the more sales you can get.
Balanced is a good combination of positive and negative reviews. I spoke about the secret formula for success in Amazon. My personal formula is TR + TD = TS TR – Total Reviews TD – Total Downloads TS – Total Sales If you can rake up a lot of reviews especially during your initial promotion days and gather a lot of downloads, your book will sell a lot of copies.
All of this depends of course on you having a great product/great book in the first place, no one will buy a poorly written book, with terrible cover designs, you get my point.
A great book is the principal thing, reviews, downloads, and marketing are just the gas that adds flame to your sales.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I have written an exceptional book that lays out all the steps and guidelines for producing a book on Amazon. To learn more, log on to abandry.com/v1/product/amazon-publishing.