We are excited to share a recent interview we did with Jenny about how she sells books on Amazon.
How Are You Making An Extra Income From Selling Books?
Jenny says she started selling books on Amazon during COVID. She had an online course and was scaling it, but when the price to acquire a customer with Facebook ads went through the roof, she had to shift to something that didn’t require her to show up on Zoom or answer emails if she didn’t want to.
As a mom of three kids, she didn’t want to be in a position where she had to choose between work and hanging out with her kids. She decided to take her course and make it into a book because you don’t have to answer an email with a book and you don’t have to show up on a Zoom call.
Jenny started researching self publishing because she knew she didn’t have the funds to hire a traditional publisher. Once she was on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), she realized people didn’t have to write a full book to make money because people are doing notebooks, journals, and planners rather than writing 60,000 words.
Jenny did a couple of journals and the first month made $18. That covered bread, milk, and chicken and she didn’t have to answer Zoom calls or leave the house. So she thought, “What if I 10X this?” Jenny says she was able to repurpose the content because she owned it. The second month she made $200. And she said, what if I 10X this again? So she kept adding books to the collection. After six months, she crossed the thousand dollar mark and it paid her mortgage.
Are These Physical Books?
Jenny says they’re physical books, but they are printed on demand. For example, when your kids have fun interests like the ocean, you can often be limited on what Target or Walmart is selling. Parents then go to Amazon and look up “shark notebook” to get something their kids want. Jenny started by making fun notebook covers. Amazon prints and handles all the shipping, and houses the digital documents.
Jenny just has to provide the creative behind making the cover. She even got her kids into it. They created artwork, she scanned it and put it onto a notebook cover, and their grandparents and cousins bought it. The kids created a coloring book on Canva and made $600 to buy their first Nintendo Switch.
Do You Have To Advertise Your Books?
Jenny says Amazon gives you a template that you need for the cover size and all you need is a Canva Pro Account because you’re not limited by resizing things and it can save you time. Once it’s on Amazon, just use keywords to where people can find it. Jenny says it’s probably really similar to how eBay uses key words for items. Once you know the keywords you can navigate those market gaps.
Anyone can put a notebook on Amazon, but what makes yours different? What customer are you speaking to? Jenny was able to scale to six figures because she found the market with Amazon, which has 90 million monthly users.
Being able to publish different types of content on Amazon enables you to find people who like buying things because they’re willing to invest in a book.
What Is The Cost To Sell Books On KDP?
There is no fee to have an account on Amazon KDP. When you do Fulfillment By Amazon (FB), you pay $39 a month and have to trademark your brand. There are barriers to entry. With Amazon KDP, it’s free around the world. The downside is that there are people who put a notebook in every color on Amazon without understanding a market gap.
Once you understand the market gap, you can establish authority and help customers find it better. Jenny realized she had to show people how to leverage Amazon KDP. She is working on a new program to help coaches put their frameworks into a workbook as a lead generation. She created a prompted line journal that made her $40,000. Now she’s looking into manufacturers overseas to see if it makes sense to pay $5,000-$6,000 up front to ship her books to Amazon. She never would have been able to reach that point if she didn’t have a book income stream machine behind the scenes.
How Many Books Do You Have?
She currently has 498 books on KDP. Jenny said she did have some book fatigue because she has a program where she teaches people to do book selling on Amazon.
How Long Does It Take To Go From Idea To Publishing?
Jenny says it takes about 30 minutes now because she knows what she’s doing. She knows how long it will take to upload her book, and once you’ve done it and the learning curve is gone, it goes quickly. The statistic is about 87 percent of the United States wants to write a book, but only 3 percent of the 87 percent actually do it. If you have all the content, you can publish it in 15 minutes on Amazon KDP.
For example, her sister texted her that she needed to write a self care journal for teenagers for Jenny’s 13-year-old niece. They were on Zoom and did it in 20 minutes. Jenny’s sister had worked in Canva so they had some designs they could repurpose. Amazon KDP takes 3 days to review the content but it can go fast. Some people have done cookbooks relatively quickly.
Amazon will give you templates for the size you need. It’s just KDP.Amazon.com and they have a whole help center
How Long Have You Been Doing This?
Jenny submitted her first book on January 1, 2022 but her book didn’t go live for three days. It’s been two years, two months.
What Can Someone New Expect?
Jenny didn’t make a lot of money overnight, but she saw the potential and quickly scaled. If you are a business owner, there is no reason why you shouldn’t learn the skillset to self publish so you can establish authority and start siphoning leads from Amazon.
It depends on the niche, the market, and the time people want to put into it.
If you’re a coach or a business owner and you have a passion to share a message, KDP is perfect for you. If you’ve ever bought a planner that stinks, and you have ideas to improve it, recreate it in KDP and change it.
Show Notes
Sign up for the live training: https://www.fleamarketflipper.com/Jenny
Get Jenny’s Book Templates Here
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fleamrktflipper/
You can find us at: https://fleamarketflipper.com/
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