5 THINGS I WISH I KNEW BEFORE STARTING ON AMAZON KDP

all right girl so I started publishing on Amazon KDP in 2018 and I've made multiple six figures publishing books specifically coloring books so here are the things I wish I knew before starting on Amazon KDP which by the way you can start from anywhere in the world even as a beginner and so the first thing I wish I would have known is that KDP can terminate your account at any time it's true so a little while back I think I was like on the way to Starbucks or something I don't know I was doing something

and I saw that I got an email that said your account has been terminated I was like wait what terminated for what so I started reading through the email and according to Amazon there was a category issue with my book but keep in mind during the time my account was terminated the way that we set up categories was a little bit different than it is now now the category system has improved so much so it's easier to place your book in the most appropriate category but sometimes depending on what type of book you publish you

are still kind of fishing to to know exactly what the best category is so now with my coloring books I only place my coloring books in Coloring Book categories let me show you so when you're in the back end of your KDP account and you scroll down to the category section you can choose up to three categories so before I used to put my coloring books sometimes in the activity book categories but now I only put them in the coloring book category so let me show you how to find that category you would just come

down to um crafts Hobbies at home home coloring book for grown-ups and then let's say I have a coloring book that has animals in it and patterns in it then what I'll do in that scenario is I will go ahead and choose the animal category as well as mandalas and patterns and that will give me my two categories sometimes I'll just leave it at two categories because in my opinion less is more so once you choose your color and book categories then you can just come here to save the categories so some of the things

that you can do to avoid your account being terminated or your book being blocked is making sure that you're choosing the most appropriate category for your book and make sure your categories also line up with those seven keywords that you put in your back end as well so that they're correlating also make sure you are not just building on Amazon kp's platform because we don't own any of these platforms so if one day the platform goes away or one day your account gets suspended or terminated you will still be able to sell your book if

you also publish sell your book on your own platform now for this I use Shopify you can start with Shopify for just a dollar so once your book gets published and it's uploaded on Amazon KDP I recommend going and ordering you some copy sis build your website sell your books from your website as well also make sure you save your interior and your cover file that you need to upload your book in case you one day need to also upload that book into a new platform such as Ingram spark or Lulu oh and when you

build your own website also consider adding your books as a digital file so that people have the option to either get the book shipped to them or they can go ahead and download the digital file where they can print out coloring pages or the coloring book on the type of paper they want to use and that also gives them access so they can download and print that book immediately they're not having to wait for the mail to get the book to them and all that kind of stuff you see what I'm saying you giving them

option all right so the second thing I wish I knew before selling on Amazon is you need to invest in your business keep in mind that you can publish your book for absolutely free but once you start making money from your book reinvest that money back into more books to grow your business tools to help you grow your business like chat GPT or mid journey and even trainings and coaching that is going to help you scale your business so that it becomes more of a passive business for you and you can start making money in

your sleep for me personally when I started publishing on Amazon KDP I didn't have a coach or Mentor that I could just go to for Hands-On things so I mainly use YouTube as a tool to learn how to put my book together listen I was going from one YouTube video that could teach me this part of the process because in 2018 all these videos that you see about Amazon KDP were not on YouTube like that so I had to take pieces from here and there and just kind of use trial and error to publish my

book but now you have so many resources including YouTube and coaches that have done the work before you so invest in those tools and resources so that you can grow your business faster and avoid some of the mistakes that others have experienced before you all right and before we get into tip number three let me know if you enjoy this type of content by commenting yes girl that way I know to keep putting out more content like this all right so the third thing that I wish I would have known before publishing on Amazon KDP

is that when it comes to Amazon KDP there are tons of types of books that you can create ranging from low content books like journals workbooks planners to medium content like coloring books so what I wish I knew before starting on KDP is that specifically Crea coloring books like these sell really well on Amazon KDP and that you need to create a series of multiples of the same types of books so if a person likes your first book then they'll be more likely to come back and see if you have any more books like that

book or even if you already have the book available before they check out then they may see that there is a series of books and go ahead and add all of the books in that series to that cart versus just purchasing one book so that increases your overall price now if you don't know how to create the coloring books yourself I do have a full step-by-step tutorial on the process of creating coloring books using canva Ai and I also have a full course showing you how to do the exact same thing using mid Journey but

I go a bit deeper from idea to publishing your book on KDP to getting your book in your hand plus you get access to my private Community where you get a chance to ask questions and all of that is available at book bag University both links will be in the description for you all right so I think we're on thing number four I don't know all right so the next thing I wish I would have known about before publishing on KDP is that no one cares about your story I'm sorry but they don't they only

care about how your story or your book can help them so when it comes to marketing your book you need to be able to focus on the value that your book provides so for example when I am selling my coloring book like on Instagram or social media rarely do I ever do a post that simply says buy my book buy my coloring book y'all ain't is pretty I sell them on how my book can provide value to them so instead of just saying this is a coloring book this is far more than a coloring book

because this helps you relax it helps you with self-care and y'all know after a busy day we be needing time to ourselves so that's something that people actually need they can relate to that cuz they like oh yeah let me go ahead and get this coloring book and then the fact that the cover of the book stands out to them that just engages them more and helps them relate to the book even more so when you are publishing your book do not just publish a book because you think it's a good idea I mean not

unless God gave you the idea or if you just publishing a book because it's on your to-do list this is just something that you want to do for your fulfillment but you don't care about making sales but if you care about making sales you're going to want to create a book that provides value to people and a book that people are already searching for and so when it comes to Niche research I only have used free tools so far in my business and one of the free tools that I use this Amazon search bar let's

take a look if I were to come to Amazon and I go ahead and start searching for something like um just going to start typing mileage as I'm typing the word out you'll see that word show up in the drop-down menu these are keywords or phrases that other people are already searching for so if someone is already searching for it then you know that there's a possibility of demand for this type book so if we were to click on the first one mileage log book for car you'll notice that it's 691 results for this particular

Niche so if people are already searching for this particular Niche and the results are less than like 3,000 then this could potentially be a profitable Niche because that means it's not saturated and the fact that we saw it in the drop down so that helps you with two pieces of information you know that people are searching for it and and is not saturated another free tool that I use is a Chrome extension called AMZ expander which just gives you a broader list of words than Amazon does and then the third free tool that I use

is called self-publishing Titans and so one of the reasons that I like this free tool is because when you type in the niche it also scores that Niche you'll notice that when I search for a mileage log book for car the niche score is 85 and it's in green so this is the third thing that can tell you that this is potentially a great Niche because if you come to the little question mark it explains the keyword Niche score so essentially the higher the score the better and Publishing Titans recommends that if you have a

score of 60 and higher that is a good sign that the niche is profitable so then you'll know if other people that have created books like this if their books are selling then you know this is probably a niche that would be good to get into all right and then the last thing that I wish I would have known before starting to publish on Amazon KDP I wish I would have known that you can use AI to generate images using CA AI or even mid Journey but the truth is when I started publishing in 2018

these AI tools were not available now they are available to you and they definitely make the creation process much faster so if you can find a way to implement AI I definitely recommend giving it a try so I mentioned canva Ai and mid Journey I'm going to enter in the same prompt using both tools so you can see the difference in the images let's take a look all right so we're in canvas's AI system which is called dreamlab and I am going to enter in the prompts created black and white handdrawn coloring page of an

illustration of a African-American woman with short wavy curly pixie cut the portrait should highlight her stylish glasses and elegant features use clean bold lines and intricate details to Define her hair and make the design suitable for coloring no shading and so canva generates four images for us and so these are the four Images I actually like image number four I could work with that one so now we're going to use the same exact prompt in mid journey and see what four Images mid Journey gives us so that we can compare to see which style you

like the best all right so this is the first image second image super cute I like that third image and we got the fourth image all right so we got our first image second image super cute third image is cute as well and this is the fourth image that we generated using mid Journey but let's say we wanted to generate a image to use maybe on a book cover if we were creating a journal or even a coloring book I'm going to come back to dreamlab this is canva and I'm going to um use the

prompt and airbrush digital illustration design of a beautiful African-American woman with long braids wearing a scarf and large earrings holding a Bible in her hand she is smiling broadly the image features Vivid colors against a white background and is Vector ready high resolution and Hyper realistic with intricate detail and so these are the four images okay Cana I actually love these images they're super cute now let's come back to Mid Journey using that same prompt and see what four Images it generates for us this time all right and I actually can look at these and

tell that I love them as well look how nice that is now with AI you do have to watch out for things like this I do not like those fingers so what I would do if I was using mid journey is I would simply click on subtle to create another variation of this particular image and so these are the other ones oh I love it I love it that is cute and then this is just the variation um you see how it cleaned up the fingers it gives four different variations of that same image so

these are the other three here's the next one the next one and the next one really really nice great quality I would still have to clean this up because I don't like how that scripture is just like right there like that um I would want it to all be one color so I would just try to clean that up using canvas editing tool or something like that or I would just regenerate the image Al together or just pick another image you know you just got to work with what you got AI is not perfect so

you know you got to just sift through and one more thing if if you have a problem creating prompts you can always come to chat GPT and ask it to help you generate prompts so you can say something like I want to create a book cover of an africanamerican woman with locks and I want it to have an airbrush effect so just start describing what you actually want can you make me a prompt to use all right and so it gave us a prompt so let's come and paste that in canva and let's see what

we get and let's also come and paste it in mid journey and see what we get all right so I don't know why it says the image might not meet the policy but this is the image that it gave us in canva so this is what mid Journey gave us okay but yeah I just wanted to show you that quick example of how you can use chat GPT to ask it for your prompts now again if you like canva AI then I do have a step-by-step tutorial that I'm going to link for you in the

description and if you like mid Journey AI I do have a full step-by-step course which also gives you access to my private Community I'll link that in the description below as well so those are the five things I wish I knew before starting on Amazon hopefully these tips have been helpful for you so that you can go ahead and start your publishing Journey with KDP because this is the year you finally going to publish that bookes right let me know in the comments now if you like this type of content make sure you go ahead

and like And subscribe so that I know to keep putting out more content like this I'm lato call and until next time bye-bye