in this video i'm going to go over my three-year journey with kdp and show you how much money i've
earned over the last three years self-publishing no content and low content books on the amazon kdp
platform and i'm going to do that by answering five of the most common questions i get which
has my kdp account being terminated how quick can you start making money with kdp how much money can
you make self-publishing on kdp how many books do you need to publish in order to make a decent
income and do you need to run amazon ads in order to make an income on kdp so if that sounds useful
then follow along now if you've not been to this channel before then welcome my name is
Paul Marles and i do videos on how to make it keep it and grow it and that's your money i'm
talking about and if you do like videos like that then please do give it a thumbs up don't
forget to hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell to receive notification of when
i produce more videos like this now when you're starting out in in any business and this could be
you know any online business including publishing on the amazon kdp platform you've got lots of
doubts you doubt whether this is going to work you doubt whether i'm actually doing what i say
i'm doing and a lot of people don't think it's going to work for them so i'm going to answer
some of these common questions and show you what i've done over the last three years and hopefully
get you to the stage where you can be publishing on amazon or if you already are
building your your number of books and building your income so let's get into it now first of all
has my kdp account been terminated now this is one that i found quite amusing because a lot of people
have messaged me telling me my account has been terminated now i don't know where this has come
from i think it may be because i haven't created any income reports over the last six months or
so and apparently this has been going around on various facebook groups and forums which i tend
not to take part in too much because i find them a bit of a time sink and i prefer to devote my time
to creating content like videos on this youtube channel but to that question has my account been
terminated well it's a categorical no it's still alive and well and truly kicking okay
next question how quick can you start making money on amazon by self publishing these no content and
low content books okay so let's go over to the kdp platform this is the reports platform and
first of all you can see i've been making sales over the last 28 days so my account is truly alive
and well if we go to the kdp reports beta and we can see here we've got my sales figures over the
last three years or so since i started and i started mid june 2018 and we can see i sold no
books during that first month second month didn't make any sales it wasn't till the third month
in august 2018 that i actually started to make sales and receive royalties and you can see it
was a grand total of $13.02 not a huge amount however that got me addicted because
it was like a showed me a proof of concept and i loved the idea of being able to create these books
free of charge upload them to amazon and just have them sit there potentially making money from the
day they published until either the account was terminated or until amazon went bust and
combusted and disappeared and we can see that the income slowly increased over the the next months
to november made $245.92 cents and december which is always the best month for making sales due to
the christmas holiday period i made $597.82 so when people message me and say look i produced
a couple of books you know i'm not making any sales what's wrong well simple answer is neither
did i took me about six weeks before i started making sales but people do contact me say they
produced their first book and within a few days they've started making sales so really the answer
is it all depends it depends what niche you picked depends on your keyword choice keyword use depends
on your cover designs and various other factors like title subtitle structure and pricing okay
the next question which is how much money can you make selling books on amazon kdp well i've made
$102,100.39 in royalties since i've started but
that's not the full picture because i've also run ads and spent money on ads that is $21,277.28 which
means my total income my royalties which i've had to pay tax on might add has been $80,821.21
and that's again just over a three year period and you might say well that's not much compared to
what other income reports people are doing kdp have produced on youtube or compared to
other online businesses in fact however that's not the full picture and there's something very
important i want to tell you so let's go and have a look at what my earnings have been over the last
three years now in the first year i made $996 second year $12,288
2020 $31,286
and this year up to now $36,255
it's about two and a half months to go so i think this year given that december is normally a very
good month i think the income will be around the $50,000 mark again that may not sound a lot
but what i want to show you is that from producing books and creating income on amazon it's
consistent and has been increasing year on year and in fact if i look at each month this year and
compare it to the same month last year each month this year has been higher than last year now i do
have to admit i haven't created that many books over the last year due to a number of reasons one
concentrating on other businesses trying to build other income streams diversify my income which is
very important because if one income stream goes down you want to make sure you've got other income
streams particularly if this is your full-time gig which for me it is because i quit my job last year
so i've only created about 12 to 20 books in the last 12 months i've also removed some from my
kdp account so i've tried to concentrate more on quality rather than quantity but the income has
still increased now the reason for that and that's one of the beauties of this business
is that once you've produced your books once sales start to trickle in
you get sales history on your books you start to get reviews of your books they then start to
rank higher in the organic search on amazon and therefore more customers see them and therefore
you make more sales so even though you might be thinking oh you know what i'm creating these books
sales are coming in but it's very slow don't be disheartened because
as sales come in as i said that can increase months or months year on year and you never know
when you're going to get that one particular book that takes off and starts to produce a significant
income because about 25 percent of my income has come from one book that has sold consistently
well and is ranked number one on amazon now i want to come on to the most important thing
about this income so say this income for this year is about 50 000 that income is passive
income and i cannot stress the importance of this income from publishing books being
a passive income now i'd rather have fifty thousand dollars of passive income than say
a hundred thousand dollars of income derived from working a full-time job and that's because that
income buys you time now and it buys you time in the future so as that income is coming in
you then have that time to do other things and that could be investing it could be building
other businesses which is what i've done over the last 12 to 18 months i've used that time from the
passive income from kdp to build this youtube channel to create recurrent affiliate incomes
create products to sell to the point where my monthly income is now six times what i earn
from kdp alone but i wouldn't have been able to achieve that had i not started publishing books in
the first place so you can see how one thing can lead on to many other things okay how many books
do you need to publish on amazon to make an income well i've got 2229 books currently do you need to
make that mon that many no if you're a graphic designer an illustrator you can create great
covers great create great interiors and you've got your keywords uh on form then you could make
a sizable income potentially from one book alone let's have a look at an example here we've got
this book on amazon from this publisher and it's a handwriting practice book with a bestseller's rank
of 141 which if we go to over to a book sales calculator we can see it's selling between 7
900 to 15 840 per month and the profit from each book or the royalties from each book is around
about 91 cents so from this one book alone this publisher is making over $14,000
so the simple answer to the question is it depends you could make a full-time income off one book
or it might take you tens hundreds or even a couple of thousand books to build up an
income now to the last question do you need to run amazon ads in order to to build an income well i
went over and i looked at my best-selling book and it's this one here and i created this book in
june 2019 and you can see that sales have grown gradually and this has been organically
over that period of time to the point where it's my best-selling book and i've never run ads on
it at all and i also looked at my top 10 books now two of those books i run i have run ads on them so
i removed them from the list and those eight books have brought in an income of $51,607
again i've never run ads on those books and i've
got lots of other books as well um that i've never run ads on that that have also
added to the income so i would say out of my total $80 000 in royalties probably around 65
to 70 000 of that have been from books that i've never run ads on now if you are just starting out
in this business and you're looking to create books get them published on amazon then i suggest
watching my book tutorials playlist next where i go through all the important steps of creating
and of publishing i hope you found it useful thank you very much for your time is really appreciated
don't forget to hit that subscribe button and until next time goodbye