Can You Make Money on Amazon KDP? My Results After 100 Books (PLUS 5 TIPS!)

so can you make money selling books on Amazon the good thing is that the answer is a big resounding yes but the negative is that it might not be as easy as you think let's get into it so some YouTubers out there might s you on the dream that making money on Amazon KDP is as easy as making a few notebooks uploading them and then watching the money roll in unfortunately that is not my experience and it's probably not the realist experience of anyone else either but don't worry I've got five tips that going to

help you make money on Amazon KDP and to show you that it can become a real Revenue stream for you so just a quick caveat is that Amazon KDP and making money online is not a getrich quick scheme just like any other business it takes time it takes effort it takes experimenting it takes marketing it's not just something you're going to nail straight away but watching videos like this one will give you every chance of succeeding now I started making my books for Amazon at the end of 2022 if we go and look at my

last year on Amazon in terms of the orders you can see I've got a small amount of sales towards the start of the year and then during summer the orders started picking up and then it was really around Christmas time that they started exploding and that is generally the power of Amazon KDP there's so many people searching for stocking stuffers for gifts at Christmas and for other times of the year as well but I'm still relatively new to Amazon KDP I've made just over 100 titles now so that is my books plus different versions so

I might only have say 80 books but I've got a few hard cover versions I've got a few ebook versions they all count as a single title so as you can see here I've got 105 titles and this has been my progression throughout the year so in January I sold 69 copies May was when it started to pick up and I sold 361 copies and then in December I sold over 4,000 books in a single month in terms of royalties it looks a little bit like this so last year I made a little bit over

$177,000 in royalties on Amazon again at the beginning of the year my royalties are around $200 to $300 they picked up a little bit over the summer and then in December my royalties were over $8,000 in a single month so hopefully that shows you the power of Amazon KDP and like I did here I just kept creating quality titles throughout the year I was testing and learning and seeing what worked and as the year went on I saw more and more sales and then that huge Spike around Christmas time and that's because I keep on

creating quality titles and I'm also marketing effectively now and I'm also using Amazon ads as well so all of that Revenue that you saw there that's not my take-home profit that's before advertising and before taxes but it does show you like a realistic growth up towards the Q4 period if you were to say start now and keep creating those quality books it will grow towards Christmas time and then it will drop flat again after that but the aim here is to keep creating quality books and the more books you have the more quality books that

you have the bigger that kind of stable base will be and then also the bigger the spike will be at Christmas time as well okay let's get into it I said I've got five tips for you to create good quality books and to make money on Amazon and tip number one is the importance of Niche research so I was guilty of this when I was CA my first books and I was just creating whatever I wanted to create putting it on Amazon and hoping that it selled or using ads inefficiently to make those sales but

if you're researching what people are interested in and trying to get into an area that's not super super competitive there's a real opportunity to rank on that first page on Amazon which is where you would make the most sales and therefore make the most money so let's say we wanted to create a coloring book so if we wanted to create quite a broad generic coloring book for adults we can see here by typing it into Amazon that there are over 60,000 results now there is literally a near 0% chance that you're ever going to rank

on the first page for that search term now yes that search term is going to have such a large amount of traffic but it's also got a ton of competition and what we want to do as Publishers is find those areas with a high demand but also with less competition so these sort of books that are ranking here are going to have so many sales but it's also going to be near impossible to rank for that search term now if we Niche down a little bit further we can see that mental health coloring books for

adults has over 3,000 results so that's straight away guessing that competition down from 60,000 to 3,000 and if we do mental health coloring books for adults simple we're down from 3,000 to 1,000 now that's get into the level where we might be able to compete and rank on that first page there are many tools out there for Niche research but one of the best ways of doing it when you get going is just use the Amazon search bar like I'm doing because that's going to tell you what people are searching for and that kind of

auto fill that you get if someone's writing in what they're looking for like coloring books for adults and it gives that suggestion there's every chance they're going to click on it so that means an increased amount of traffic and if you're ranking up there for that search ter there's every chance you're going to get your organic sales so tip number one is Niche down but you still need to make sure there's demand for your product tip number two is the importance of making an extremely good book cover now if you're using something like canva or

Microsoft pain I would highly recommend using a service like Fiverr to create a good quality book for you and that's because on Amazon book covers are the first thing that people see so going for a slightly different Niche here we are looking at football trivia books and as we can see here as we scroll down the cover needs to pop out from a thumbnail view it needs to be really clear what the code cover contains but it also needs to be visually appealing you can see some really good examples of what a good front cover

would look like and what tends to happen is the more competitive the niche the better your cover needs to be if we went back to covering book for adults you can see here that the book covers are really striking and the text pops out really nicely and it's really clear what you're getting so what I would suggest to do with your book covers is to look at what other people are doing for your type of product and then try and better it try and stand out maybe take inspiration from the bestselling ones but you want

to be standing out from the crowd not only is that going to make your book more salable but when you run ads to your books it's going to increase the click-through rate and hopefully increase the purchase rate as well tip number three is that you need to Market your book I use Amazon ads because it's an inbuilt part of the Amazon platform and one of the keys to marketing effectively is that generally you want to be advertising where your customer are so yes you could run ads on Facebook and Google but the conversion rate of

those clicks is going to be a lot less so definitely try that especially if you're an author targeting certain genres you know Facebook ads and Google ads might work well for you but generally what I found is that Amazon ads work really effectively for certain books and it's a key skill that you need to learn if you want to be successful selling books on Amazon tip number five is to create a brand so after you've uploaded your first book on Amazon you'll be able to create your own author page so if we take a look

at this book for example which is a number one best seller you can see in the from the publisher section which is your A+ content that they have it branded really nicely from kite Fox publishing and the benefit of that on top of looking very professional is that you can have your own author page and all of your books linked together so this kite Fox publishing if I click on their profile you can see all of the other books that they've created and what tends to happen if someone buys a book on Amazon and they

really like it they'll go back to it and search for some other books by that same publisher another quick tip on this as well is to create a series so this book here is book one of four in relaxing books to calm your mind and stress relief so this one is a best seller and if we click on this we can see the other books in the series and what I would imagine is happening is because people are enjoying the first book that also going on to purchase the second third and fourth book in that

Series so you want to make sure that you're creating your own author page so people can find your other books and also where possible linking them in a series and tip number five and what I have experienced over the past sort of 18 months of creating books on Amazon is the importance to create quality content I think several years ago there was a huge opportunity on Amazon to just publish whatever you wanted and make sales because there was a need for it nowadays there's a lot of Publishers you know you've got tools like AI out

there and there's so much competition flooding the market and the best way to outperform that and to stand out is to create quality content so that starts with your cover but then it needs to continue inside the book unless you're creating low content books like journals or notebooks there's a look inside feature on Amazon and that lets people read a sample of the book and look at the Quality for themselves so again on this book clicking the Read sample you can see a little bit of the content inside and you can see how good quality

it is before you purchase it so for example if you're creating coloring books with AI content and you're not making sure they're high quality people are going to see that and choose not to purchase your book so that's one of the key reasons for creating quality content but the second reason as well is that when those reviews start coming in what you don't want to happen is to get a one or two star review because that's got every opportunity of tanking your book and then after that you're not going to get any sales you want

to be creating a book that people want to buy and that they're going to enjoy because if you're organically getting people coming back to your book and giving it four or five star reviews that's going to increase the purchase rate of other people in the future and the key to doing well on Amazon isn't relying on ads to sell your book so what I do is I use ads to get those initial sales when I've launched a book and then hopefully I'll start to get a few reviews coming in then after that what I found

is the good books tend to sell themselves I might still use ads to bump up some sales and try and rank for certain keywords but the true success of a book that I found so far on Amazon is when you rank really well for a keyword and you've got a very good quality book that people are enjoying so let me show you an example I launched this one single book last year so this is a curring book for adults and I launched it in August of 2023 I used ads to get it going and it

actually started ranking really well for a certain keyword and I don't even run any ads to this book at all anymore and as you can see in December with no ads it got almost 1,000 organic sales and then coming into this year without ads it continues to sell organically every single month so it's getting between sort of 250 and 325 sales every month organically without ads so that one book is making me maybe $400 $500 a month and hopefully that shows you the power of Amazon KDP and that it is possible to make money selling

books but if you want to be successful you need to treat it as a long-term Venture so as I me mentioned at the beginning I've now made over 100 titles and I think that's the kind of level you need to get to to start seeing decent sales you'll probably make some books that sell nothing but hopefully there'll be a few books that kind of break through and sell like this one does now I hope I haven't completely put you off but I hope that I've given you some sort of realistic expectation of Amazon KDP so

if it's something that you're interested in if you want to earn a bit of money on the side if you want to build up a side hustle within this over a few years it's a fantastic way to earn more money but it does take that time it does take that effort and if you focus on it and treat it like a business as every chance you're going to see real success okay I hope this video was useful let me know in the comments below how you're getting on with your publishing business and I'll see you

in the next one