If you're just starting at self publishing on the Amazon KDP platform,
whether it's fiction, non-fiction or low content books,
then you're probably asking yourself these questions. Will it work?
Will I make any money? Am I wasting my time? Is this just a scam?
Or do I even have the skills to be able to succeed at this in the first place?
And I know because these were the exact same questions I asked myself when I
first started out. So in this video,
I'm going to give you my three keys to success,
self publishing on the KDP platform. Now,
if you've not been here before then welcome to the channel.
My name is Paul Marles and I do videos on how to make it,
to keep it and grow it. And that's your money I'm talking about.
If you do like videos like that, then please do give it a thumbs up.
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smash that notification bell to receive notification of when I produce more
videos later, this. Okay, so what are these three keys? Well,
briefly they're hard work, persistence and experimentation.
So you could say, okay, you've given me those three keys.
I can go away now and be a success. Well, not quite because there's a,
there's a bit more detail to this and I do have some actionable steps for you
to take away and give yourself the best chance of succeeding at publishing on
Amazon KDP.
Now let's deal with the hard work and the problem is with this business,
the barrier to entry is very low.
You can actually do all this for free and you can get books up pretty quickly.
So you've got to do something to stand out from the crowd.
And one of those things is putting in the hard work to learn this business
and putting in the hard work to create the books.
To create books that do stand out.
So the time you need needs to be devoted to creating
and to learning. Now,
what I suggest doing is trying to find a regular amount of time every
day to devote to this business and treat it like an early,
a proper startup business. And if you can get in an hour,
two hours a day, you're going to get the maximum benefit out of this.
Now I know a lot of you probably have full-time jobs,
have families have kids, and it's difficult to find that time,
but you've got to try and do your best to actually, you know,
find those hours in the day, whether it's before work,
after work or at weekends. When I first started out,
I had a full-time job and I was working,
I was working on this mostly in the evenings and lunchtimes,
and I would go on until one o'clock, two o'clock in the morning,
every single day. And I did that for months and months.
And so, you know, you've got to try and do that yourself. Now,
what I would suggest doing is splitting your time
between learning and between and creating, and maybe looking at something like,
you know, for every half an hour learning you do,
you do one and a half hours of creating.
Maybe at the start when you are learning, when you get, you know,
trying to get over that sort of big learning curve,
doing sort of maybe one hour of learning to every one hour of creating.
And there are lots of resources out there to learn. There's YouTube,
where you can get most of it for free.
There are courses you can buy from self-publishers
and then there are courses on sites like Udemy, Skillshare,
Coursera.
I particularly use Udemy and Skillshare a lot.
And I've done courses on color theory, lettering,
and I've done courses over the years on keyword research because I've had
other businesses online. And as I said before,
keyword research is essential to nearly every business online.
So my advice,
my actionable step on this is to get out a calendar and mark
out regular amounts of time when you know, you're going to be free,
that you can devote to this and stick to it.
And even if you've been doing this for months and months, and you find yourself,
you know, one week doing two hours,
the next week doing seven hours a week after that,
maybe nothing at all, try and do it on a regular basis. Otherwise,
you find that you learn something,
then you don't implement it for a week and you're having to relearn it over
again. So that,
so if you manage to learn something and implement it every day,
you'll find that it sticks a lot better.
And you'll find that you'll learn a lot quicker and you'll achieve success a lot
quicker. Now, the next key is persistence.
And this is important as all these three keys are,
and that is you need to keep doing the learning and the
creating. Now, many of you out there probably drive a car.
You remember when you're driving, if you know your stall the car,
or you get the wrong gear or you make some error, what do you do?
Do you get out the car, declare it a scam.
And I'm going to be looking at other types of transport. No,
you persist.
You learn from your mistakes and you keep going at it.
You keep grinding away and eventually you learn to drive and you become quite
proficient at it. Well, most people do anyway, and it's the same for children.
When they're learning to walk, you know, they stand up,
they take that first step and invariably fall over. What do they do?
Do they declare this, this walking business a saturated niche?
No, they get up. They take another step and then they take another step.
And eventually they learn to walk. And it's the same with this.
As any other business. You're going ot experience hurdles.
You're going to have failures and you need to be able to persist and continue
with this. Because as you do,
you're going to learn more and you're going to create better and make those
sales.
Now the problem is most people set themselves to shorter time
frame, to succeed at this business. Most people, from messages and comments,
I get give themselves like a couple of weeks or a month because I get
messages. I need $500 next month, you know,
for medical bills or to pay my rent.
Do you think this is possible producing books? Well,
99% of the time, I'd say no,
that's not possible because you need more realistic time goals in which to
persist at this. And when I first started out,
I gave myself a year.
I knew this would succeed because at the same people produce books and Amazon,
they independently published books, the Createspace or the KDP books.
And I could see people were making sales and I could see these are relatively
easy to create compared to say, you know, 60,000,
120,000 word books. And so I said, I'm going to give myself a year.
I don't mind if I don't earn any money at all in that year,
I would just get my head down, put in the grind, learn this business.
And hopefully succeed. Sales did start to come in, I think relatively early,
within, you know, few weeks, a month.
And that was enough motivation to keep me going.
But I was prepared to be motivated enough without getting sales,
to persist to that one year mark. And then I said to myself, okay,
if I do start making sales,
then I will give myself three years to make two and a half thousand dollars a
month. Because I figured that over that time with my full-time job,
I could start to pay off debts,
reduce my sort of expenses,
and then hopefully be in a position to go full time on this venture and then
look at other online ventures as well.
And that actually came about a lot earlier than I anticipated.
That actually came about probably at around the 18 month mark.
So the key here is persistence.
A lot of people will give up right before they're about to achieve
success. And that's the same with publishing books.
It's the same with YouTube channels.
It's the same with creating websites online.
A lot of people give up before they actually,
or are just about to achieve that success.
And you've got to remember everyone at this business was a beginner.
At some point,
even those massively successful publishers you see on Amazon
that you think you can't compete with, they were beginners like you.
And, you know, they started with those same self-doubts,
but they persisted,
achieved success and built on that to create really thriving,
profitable businesses.
And there is no reason whatsoever why you can't do that as well.
So the step to take from this is set out a timeframe,
give yourself a reasonable timeframe in which to achieve
certain goals. And if you think that timeframe is,
I've got to make money by next week, then forget it,
this business isn't for you because it's by no means a get rich quick scheme.
It's it's anything, but, and you're not going to be able to achieve that.
So if you give yourself the permission to not make any money
and, you know,
give it a number of years before you achieve success,
then you've got a better chance of getting there. And also,
in order to be able to possess, you've got to enjoy the process.
You've got to enjoy the learning. You've got to enjoy the creative process,
because if you don't enjoy any aspects of that,
then there's no way you'd be able to go through that. You know,
give yourself a year of not making any money because you'll just get frustrated.
So learn to enjoy it,
or hopefully you enjoy it in the first place which got you into this business in
the first place.
Now the third key and probably one of the most difficult for most people is the
experimentation because it involves failure.
It means learning to fail and also accepting failures.
Now I've got just under two and a half thousand books published and I've got a
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds that just don't rank and have
never made a sale, but that didn't discourage me.
I just plowed on. And if there was glaring things,
,errors that I made,
then I would learn from that and improve my next books.
And I would gradually improve on what I was creating
because you need to be able to fail, to learn, to improve,
to get that success, and then continue on that cycle,
make errors because you're pushing yourself that bit more learn from those
errors, those failures. And again,
go round in that circle and eventually success will come and it will come on a
more regular basis.
And it was only from experimentation that I found a particular cover design that
suddenly started selling well. And I used that design.
I implemented it in other niches, in other types of books.
And those also started to sell quite well.
And I wouldn't have found that out if I was just sticking to a particular style
or trying to copy other people. That doesn't get you anywhere.
If you copy other people's books that are successful
Amazon won't suddenly give your books a chance because they don't want your
books that are exact copies competing against the successful ones.
They'll just disappear off the rankings and Amazon will keep pushing those
successful ones. So you need to experiment with keywords,
sentence structures in your titles, cover designs, the lettering,
the how you orientate your designs on the page
and the keywords that you use. These are all areas that you can,
you can experiment with and you need to in order to achieve so success.
And everyone will achieve success in their own different way.
Some will be through keywords, some will be through designs,
and there's no set formula to that.
You only realize and learn it by experimenting yourself. And again,
this experimentation comes down to having reasonable time goals.
Because if you set yourself a month to make $500,
then you're not giving yourself any room to experiment. You're,
you're trying to get that perfect book with a perfect sentence with the perfect
keywords and the perfect pricing and that doesn't exist. Okay.
So take these three keys that I've given you hard work,
persistence and experimentation. That's the giving yourself permission to fail,
move forward with them, try and implement them, give them some thought.
And I guarantee that if you do that and give yourself enough time,
you will succeed at this. And if you are having success and please,
I love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments or message me. Now,
if you are a beginner or new to this business,
then I suggest watching this playlist next,
which is my book tutorials playlist on how to get started.
I hope you found this content useful. Thank you very much for your time.
It's very much appreciated. If you did enjoy it,
please do give it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button.
And until next time, goodbye.