If I Were Starting Amazon KDP in 2025, THIS is What I'd Do ($0 - $100k)

so over the years I've made over $1.5 million in actual royalties with Amazon KDP these are some of the income reports that I've done in the past and you can see that I was averaging between $3 to $35,000 a month sometimes even 40K in a month from my KDP account so I've had a business that was generating multiple six figures a year which I eventually sold for $820,000 and now I'm building my new KDP account which is once again up to a six figure a year run rate so this is going a little slower than

my first account just because with my first account I was working on it fulltime like literally just focusing on that this one I'm trying to see how much I can build while spending as little time as possible so I got a team uh basically spending like less than 30 minutes a week on it but it's still doing around $10 to $20,000 a month if you count KDP also the audiobooks and other channels as well and we are trying to grow it from here and as always if you don't believe anything I say I documented everything

for the past couple years just go to Shawn doit KDP income reports and you will see all my previous income reports there so KDP allowed me to travel the world I've been to Bali Thailand you know China and many many other places but most importantly I've helped hundreds of others to do the same right to be able to build a KDP business to the point where they're making part-time income or even replace their full-time job and do this full-time and achieve more freedom but the thing is times are changing right I started this business in

2016 and what worked before doesn't really work anymore so you know really the business itself is changing uh so was every single other business as well not just in KDP uh because of AI and Technology right so AI is absolutely disrupting the game both good and bad ways uh so we must update our strategies you know KDP is still an amazing business right it still works I would say it is still to this day one of the best business to start but the way we approach this business must be updated as well so in this

video I'll show you what you must do to go from zero to Mak it over 100k with Amazon KDP and before we start if you want an 80-minute master class on how I buil a KDP business business to this level besides of this training right I have another free training if you guys want to check it out the link is below this video all right so the first thing I would do is I would focus on high demand niches so a lot of people would teach you to Niche down so much to the point where

you barely have any competition and they say it's good because you can rank much easier but the thing is if you Niche down so much to the point where there's absolutely zero competition the topic and the keyword is probably not that profitable right because competition really shows how profitable it is you know it's profitable and that's why a lot of people are doing it so the way you want to approach this honestly is you want to focus Less on competition and more on demand demand is extremely important right demand is how many people are looking

for the topic you know and how profitable it is so low competition is important but demand comes first you have to find a topic that is very very profitable and then if you find something that's also low competition that's amazing but it matters less right though as an example right this brand right here kite Fox publishing uh publishes books in the topic of stress relief adult calling book mindfulness word search 2024 word search very very broad topics it's not low competition everybody knows these keywords right Anxiety Relief word search for those everyone's doing it and

yet this brand is making over $68,000 a month in Revenue same as this brand Elizabeth Cole publishing books on children's stories or children's books right uh that teaches a lesson so I'm stronger than anxiety so book on teaching kids uh to you know manage anxiety manage anger here uh body boundaries Etc like a lot of people are doing the same thing and yet she makes over $53,000 a month just from paperback not counting the audiobook which is kind of small but a couple thousand more from Kindle obviously she has the hard cover version with an

additional $99,000 a month in Revenue so she's doing really well and the last one is Dana K white so she publishes books on decluttering everybody knows about decluttering I use this as an example many many times and yet she does $8,000 a month from just a few books right and another $2,000 a month from just one book in hard cover she does an extra $37,000 from Audiobook and another $3,000 so she's doing about $50,000 a month in Revenue as well so my point is this all these big successful Publishers they never focused on finding low

competition keyword just so they can go and avoid everyone else right instead what they did is just went into the same keyword everyone else is going into but they made a better book they just focused on creating a better quality book and marketing it better so this is why in my opinion competition matters less right because Amazon algorithm heavily favors quality books so it really doesn't matter if there are 50,000 other books out there because 49,99 books of the 50,000 I can guarantee that they're crap right most people are doing the bare minimum right like

most people are watching side hustle videos on YouTube you know pumping out journals that they copy pasted from canva or something and they expect to make money with zero reviews zero marketing right so you know what you want to do is not to do the same thing and then try to compete by just having a brand new keyword nobody else is going into instead just going into the same keyword that we know is profitable right and just make a better book and do proper marketing like getting reviews and sales so I want to talk about

quality versus quantity right obviously quality is super super super important way more than quantity you know if you have to choose one you always go with quality but it does not mean that you should invest everything into one book right there is something magical about a KDP business if you have a lot of books right all those books making little bit here a little bit there it adds up so the goal should be to publish as many high quality books as possible right because you don't want to just focus on super high quality book and

you don't want to just have this one book mindset and just publish one book but also you don't want to just go with a quantity approach and publish a bunch of crap book you need a middle ground and that is why I say publish as many high quality book as possible but the thing is most people have no idea what quality even is right and that is why you got to practice with publishing multiple books so your first book always going to suck right but that's fine you know you're going to understand if it's good

if it's bad right quality wise and then you keep publishing to the point where you eventually start getting feedbacks uh of four and five star reviews then you know that that is the quality that people are looking for and then you want to publish as many books as you can in the quality level next thing you got to keep in mind is that literally everyone can create content now right so once again AI is making it easier than ever to publish a book which is amazing if you're just getting started because it's a lower barrier

of Entry like you know it's a lot easier for you to go and publish a book now compared to many many years ago right which is great it's easier for you to start but the con is that everybody else is doing it as well so it's easier for you to start but doesn't mean that you should stay at the level putting the bare minimum right just you know asking chat GPD for something copy pasting it into a book that is like the bare minimum of what everyone else is doing right so you can start with

that you can probably make you know 10 bucks a month 50 bucks a month 100 bucks a month from a book right but you know if you want to make thousands a month if you want to really make lifechanging income then you don't want to stay there right you want to keep improving your craft so once again the pro of you know AI becoming mainstream is that you can create a book very easily right so it's easier for people to start but the con is that just making content is not going to do anything you

have to do marketing right the way you stand out is not by creating content it's by marketing the book getting reviews getting sales once again let me show you some examples so this is the type of book that literally everyone else is making right bedtime story book for kids AI generated cover looks kind of nice right AI does create some nice images but all they did is upload and forget no reviews nothing right so the fact that everyone can now make book covers like this is amazing but the thing is that's the thing everyone can

do it so you have to do more than that so if you want to stand out you got to learn marketing getting reviews once again and getting sales you cannot be doing what everyone else is doing and expect to make any significant money because here's the thing even if you go and find an untapped keyword that nobody else is in right and you publish in it yes you'll make money for a while but I can almost guarantee that if you publish a crap book right it's only a matter of time until somebody else discovers the

keyword make a better book your book dies off compared to that if you publish a high quality book from the beginning by the time somebody else finds a keyword it gets flooded doesn't matter because your book will always stand out because it's better than everybody else's so the bottom line is this it is so much easier to just make a better book in a proven keyword than trying to find an untapped keyword all right so let's talk about marketing so I keep saying marketing is important but it's very very simple it's not this complex thing

that's very overwhelming I promise you it's very simple right it's as simple as getting reviews and getting sales right you want to get reviews first and then you get sales and it's essentially bringing more eyeballs to your books so we call this traffic in marketing right it's basically getting more traffic to your product in your case it's book more people see your book right you will get more sales So within the first month of publishing you want to get to 10 reviews minimum and then from there uh you want to build it up to 50

reviews or so and if you're absolutely not making any sales of 50 reviews then the issue could be the keyword or your book might not be that good so if that's the case then you can step back re-evaluate what's the issue if it's your book if it's a keyword then you might have to just move on and give up on that book right you can go and do a better job on the second book but until you get 50 reviews you don't know if it's the book that's bad if it's the keyword or maybe you

just don't have enough reviews right so reviews are essential um there are many ways to get reviews I have plenty of videos on getting reviews just look up sha thewit uh reviews and there are many videos like that but I'll leave a link to this video in the description it's basically talking about the easiest way to get reviews uh so go and check it out if you want to so once you get enough reviews next is to show that book to as many people as possible and that is the marketing side you got to get

the reviews first because you know if your book has zero reviews there's no social proof right you show it to as many people as possible right no one's going to buy it because there's no reviews right so you got to get reviews first so after you do that then the marketing right so the fastest way to show your book to a ton of people is Amazon as right you just pay a little bit of money for Amazon to show your book to a ton of people you get a lot of eyeballs if your book is

attractive you will start making sales right so that is the fastest way okay and you can start with as L as $3 a day now if you don't have money for as or if you don't want to spend that money for whatever reason then there is a freeway which is social media so like Tik Tok Instagram reals you can promote your book that way and I have many videos on that once again so if you need help on anything all you got to do is look up Sha doit topic right so in this case Shawn

doit Tik Tok if you want to learn more about that and there's a lot of videos on it or if you want Shawn doit Amazon ads tutorial I'll leave a link to this video below this video as well so one thing I want you guys to understand is that you're always paying with time or money right so just because you're not paying money you know doing social media you're going to be spending a lot more time posting content which kind of costs money right cuz time is money so you have to choose what you pay

you know do you want to save time by just you know running Amazon ads or do you want to save money by doing a lot of social media me personally I prefer Amazon ads but you can do both and both is a great way as well so if you do want to do free marketing right social media if you want to learn more about that then once again there's a video on it I'll leave a link below this video uh but basically you make short form viral content promoting your book and it's as simple as

just filming the book uh on your phone right I'll give you some examples here so just to showcase the power of Tik Tok right so there's a story of a young adult fiction author right who was doing a book signing and I think either a Walmart or a Target some kind of store right and he was just sitting there and no one was coming up to him so he looked very sad right and you know this Tik talker went into the store randomly saw him just sitting there uh with his book and uh kind of

looking defeated right so then he went up filmed a video uh talking to him just interacting and he posted that on Tik Tok it went absolutely viral right and his book went from 5 million BSR which means he's making absolutely zero sales to number one in the entire Amazon Kindle Store he's making like tens of thousands of dollars every single day right and it kind of slowed down since then but he's still doing crazy good so that is from one viral video so just the crazy thing about social media is the potential of going viral

so that's just one example but specifically what kind of videos can you make right so all you got to do is go to Tik Tok and search for you know whatever book is so if you're doing calling books search for calling books right uh and you know if you're doing something else search for that but as an example this person Megan miles art uh is absolutely blowing up right now her books are blowing up on Amazon she has an extremely simple book like literally everyone can make this book right and this is what I mean

by you know when I say everyone can be a content creator but you got to learn marketing because her books are there's nothing special about this like literally anyone can make this interior image right like even if you're outsourc it it's like three bucks per page you know and you can make it yourself too obviously but she's doing like 50 60k even more a month in Revenue right and what she's doing is Tik Tok marketing so she posted daily consistently uh and all she's doing is showing her books right she ordered it you know filmed

herself just going through the book on a phone hund like flipping through it 179,000 views right and a lot of sales from that this one she's just flipping through her page or I guess she's calling it in right kind of like ASMR uh but with calling books and that is very very popular now on Tik Tok 3.5 million views this one right here is once again same kind of style right she just flipping through it and that's a video 6.6 million views insane right so uh you can definitely do Tik Tok very very powerful especially

if you got coling books and those kind of books but the point is just look it up on Tik Tok there's a lot of examples of how you can make these videos and if you're worried about Tik Tok shutting down because it was was on the news um don't worry because Tik Tok is just one method right if Tik Tok shuts down people who watch these short form content they're going to go somewhere else right like the short form content is not going to die just because Tik Tok dies no they're going to just go

to Instagram reals Maybe YouTube shorts maybe there's another social media channel that's going to pop up doesn't matter right but bottom line the need for Content like this will always stay right so if you know how to make it you can just go to another social media site all right so the next thing I would do is to focus on building authority so you know building authority is basically just becoming an expert on the topic right so in order to become an expert on whatever Niche whatever topic that you're publishing uh in you cannot hop

around into different niches you cannot publish a book on this topic and you cannot go and you know just try another Niche right that's hopping around uh if you do that you're never going to be an expert right so basically you want to focus on one Niche go as deep as possible until people recognize that you're the go-to brand right or or the expert in the niche so become an expert on the topic serve the audience right and this is how you can go from just being a publisher to a full-blown business let me show

you some examples so this brand right here zenful note right they started off with publishing this book Shadow work Journal okay and she kind of took the same approach as the the last uh Tik Tok channel that we saw right she just posted daily and it just blew up it's insane once again because these videos are getting 68 million views it's just I'm just like blown away every time I talk about this all she's doing is filming one page of her video and reading the exercise out loud she's not even doing the exercise nothing she's

literally just reading it 68 million views insane right but what she did right was she was consistent she was posting every single day right and she still posts every single day and her average views are just a couple thousand right so it's not like you know she always gets million views you can do the same thing and if you're getting a couple thousand some of those videos will pop and it's just going to blow up and it can absolutely be life-changing but if you look at her Channel now she's selling a lot more than just

this book right so obviously she started selling another book like you know uh Second Edition and uh more books in the series but she's also selling a some kind of card like a Terra card or whatever it is right and she's also coming up with an app so this is what I mean is that once you have a brand established once you become an authority you can become a full-blown business not just a publisher you can start selling backend offers right from your books so basically the book is how people find you but from there

you can sell additional stuff right physical products even coaching offers even your courses and you can make a lot more money there and that's not going to happen unless you establish yourself as an authority so when it comes to building an authority in the niche you don't need to be an amazing writer right it's not about your writing style it's more so about providing value and unique insights right so just focus on one Niche so you can understand your customer because you've been in the niche for so long that you know what people are looking

for right once you get to the point then all you got to do is try and give people what they want in your book as much as possible and it's as simple as that until you become an authority on it so the next thing I would do uh is to build a team from the start so I would focus on Outsourcing tasks that I am not good at from the very very beginning so you can do everything in this business for free which is one of the the amazing thing about publishing right it's the biggest

benefit but it does not mean that you should right just because you can do things for free does not mean that you should okay focus on what you're good at you want to hire out the rest so as I said earlier you're always paying with either time or money right just because you can save money by doing the things yourself uh does not mean that it's good because you're spending so much more time like a lot of people design book covers on canva and they spend literally days making a book cover that ends up being

worse than what they could have got from Fiverr for five bucks or 10 bucks paying somebody else to do it so if you're in the US and if you want to think about what your time is worth right even if you're making minimum wage paying somebody 5 10 20 bucks for a book cover instead of spending days making it I think is a very good investment so once again my new KDP account is back to six figures a year and I spend less than an hour a week on it so one of the first thing

you should Outsource is the book cover right I started with paying five bucks per cover right and that amount increased as business grew you know I started making more money that I reinvested in a better cover designer and then a better cover designer and now I pay between $100 to $200 per book cover but obviously you don't have to start off that way right like 5 10 20 bucks some of the recommended Fiverr gigs that I have in this video which I will link below this video can create a really really high quality cover for

you know 5 to 20 bucks okay so I have a video on it once again check it out but you know it will take me hours to make a cover on canva that is worse than what I could get for five bucks on Fiverr so obviously it's kind of a no-brainer uh to Outsource it rather than just spending your time unless you want to learn design skills unless you you're happy doing it then you know by all means do it so again as an example this is one of the gig that I work with uh

for a very very long time it's $10 and you can see the designs are really really good you still have to work with them go back and forth right so it's not like you know it's guaranteed amazing every single time but it's unlimited revisions meaning if you're not happy just don't accept it right so you can work with them make as many changes as possible until you're happy with it okay so as you can see she does well with fiction books non-fiction as well cuz I do non-fiction I work with her many many times but

this is another one if you want to focus on non-fiction type of book covers so she charged 30 bucks right and she does really good designs like these are amazing right so that's another one I'll leave a link to these gigs below this video and I've worked with her as well if you want more of a premium option uh she charge definitely higher as you can see but her designs are absolutely amazing okay so this is another option once again I'll leave a link to the video okay and then also these gigs Below in the

description but honestly you don't have to use these book cover designers right all you have to do is go to Fiverr right and look at book cover and there are a lot more gigs that you can go and obviously just check out the samples pick the one you like and then go from there so Fiverr is amazing but there's another site that's really really good and that is upwork and this is where you can hire writers uh illustrators and vas and if you're looking for those kind of tasks then upwork is my favorite place to

do so and you can manage your team directly on the platform as well so I'll leave a link to upwork below this video but basically if you're trying to hire ghost riders uh if you're trying to hire illustrators for custom illustrations or if you just want a virtual assistant for your business upwork is a great place you can do that on five or two but upwork is my preference in terms of the rates that you want for Ghost Riders it depends on the topic but typically I pay $2 to $3 per 100 words so that

means if you have a 30,000 word book which is about 150 Pages then your book will be anywhere between $600 to $900 to get it written and this is uh if you want quality right so for illustration you can pay between three bucks for a very very simple uh illustration up to $20 per page uh if you want a full color full background as well so that kind of depends but typically I pay between three to five bucks and for VAs that's like 4 to eight bucks an hour or so so almost every single step

in the business can be Outsource once again writing cover design formatting reviews ads and much more if you want to learn how I automate 99% of my KDP business I filmed a video on exactly how I do that so I will once again leave a link below this video so you might be thinking I don't have money to Outsource books or run ads right what do I do well if that's the case once again there's a free alternative to literally everything so you can write the books you can do your own social media marketing right

and you can start off with that no problem but the thing is the issue is that people get stuck there you know they never evolve past that phase because they're scared of investing the money right they're scared of you know perhaps losing it but the thing is the point of Outsourcing it is that you can publish a book quicker so that you can make back the money and so much more because you're never going to make money unless you publish a book right but because people are scared of Outsourcing or perhaps just you know they

take so long to do things themsel they end up giving up before they even publish a book I just don't want you to do that right if you can publish a book doing it yourself just to see this works and you start actually making money that's great right but take that profit and reinvest into getting a better book cover next time right and you make more money from that take that profit and get a better formatter right and take that profit and now have somebody run ads for you right and you eventually scale your business

that way so you don't have to start with having teams and systems but you should work towards it all right so next thing I recommend is you don't want to ignore audiobooks uh because you know paperback Kindle those are great but audiobook is honestly just blowing up right now so audiobook as you can see from this chart is a growing market right it'll only keep growing as more people who's reading ebooks paperback is going to start switching over to audiobook because it's just more convenient you can see that we're here in 2024 okay it's projected

to Triple in Market size in six years by 2030 okay and it's just going to keep going from there so this is kind of another reason why you want to focus on high content books because if you're doing low content books or if you're doing like coling books you can only publish your book in paperback or hard cover maybe right uh you cannot do ebook you you cannot do audio and you're missing out on a lot so you can definitely do you know those kind of books but if you want the biggest money long-term typically

it's from high content books okay and also it'll be free to create an audiobook soon uh thanks to AI A6 is already coming up with a you know AI narration beta thing so you can start turning your book into an audiobook with AI it sounds pretty legit and it's completely free so there's like no reason not to do it as an example we got Christine one of our students right she made 10 K in a month from ACX which is audio right alone not counting the KDP sale she made which is like another $44,000 Nicolo

over here made $58,000 in July right 50k came from KDP and $8,300 in additional income came from audiobooks so I got a whole video on how to do audiobooks so once again I'll leave a link below this video all right so the next thing I would definitely not neglect and I'm mentioning these things like audiobook and also bundles is because a lot of you guys don't do this right nobody really talks about this which I don't understand why but bundles is absolutely a GameChanger because it's a free book right you already have your book files

so you're just putting it together and you can sell it as a whole new book which is a kind of a bundle or you know box set so you can see here we got two crochet book you put it together sell it as a crochet twoin one bundle so bundles are literally free to make it sells better because it's a better uh value for the customer like it's it's cheaper for the customer to buy a bundle than buying one book individually at a time right so you make more Sales Plus you can price it higher

so you make more royalties per sale it's better deal for the customer and it's literally free to make like it's a win-win-win type of thing like there's no downsizes to it so you really should be taking advantage of bundles so people in the high content space know bundles is a thing like a lot of people do it but for some reason people in the low content medium content space they don't know that bundles are even a thing I don't understand why I think a lot of people believe that bundles are not allowed in low content

for some reason I don't know why but just to show you that it's it's completely allowed right and it's actually doing extremely well these are some examples so this is a brain game three books in one bundle right so they had these three books all they did is put it together sell it as a new book now look at this you know I got this book beam plugin so you got to pay for book beam but it's really cool because it shows you the SMA roties and stuff uh if you want to check out book

beam the link is below this video but it's showing me that it's making 55 to6 $6 a day in royalties that's 1,500 bucks a month right from a free book that you made which is pretty crazy right same as this one six inone collection word search puzzles for kids so it's just six word search puzzles put it into uh one book so one bundle book and this is once again doing 60 to 64 bucks a day so that's 1,800 bucks a month from a free book that you can make uh because you already have the

book files right so super cool the same as this one so we got large print words search four books in one collection and this one is crazy it's making $487 to 75 bucks every single day so let's take the average 600 bucks right times 30 so this book is doing $188,000 a month from a free book like it's nuts so don't sleep on bundles okay and if you guys want a complete tutorial on how to create bundles let me know in the comments uh so type something like I want a bundle video or just type

bundle in the comments and let me know all right so just to recap these are are all the steps that we talked about in this video okay you want to focus on high demand niches you want to publish as many high quality books as you can you want to learn marketing so getting reviews and sales you have to build a brand and expand your product line going from Just Books to now you know selling much more than that okay you want to Outsource early for things you're not good at okay and you want to maximize

the distribution with audiobooks and bundles so don't just rely on just ebooks or don't just do paperback do it all right ebook paperback audio hard cover and just reach as many people as you can with it so if you guys want to watch more of this step-by-step tutorial uh first of all let me know in the comments you like these but also I got another video that you can follow along uh which is this one uh one year Amazon KDP blueprint for beginners right teaching you how to go from 0 to 10K per month so

once again the link to this is below this video so basically all the videos and resources I mentioned uh is in the description below so hope you enjoyed the video leave a like if you haven't yet subscribe if you want to watch more of these videos comment for the algorithm comment bundles if you want those bundle videos uh do whatever you want to do and uh I'll see you guys in the next one bye