- Since its inception in 2007,
Kindle Direct Publishing has established itself
as the dominant force
when self publishing on Amazon.
Does KDP carry any real weight in 2021?
Is KDP truly worth it this year?
We're going to be doing a deep dive
into Kindle Direct Publishing
and all the features they have available to them
and how it might benefit you
or work against you this year.
First of all, let's get it right off the rip.
KDP publishes eBooks and print books.
There is no upfront costs in exchange for a revenue share.
A little bit of a split.
So anytime that you make a sale,
Amazon collects a percentage of that
and you collect the rest of that.
Here's a question I get a lot is
how many books can I publish?
As many as your heart desires
under as many pen names as you wish to
underneath one account.
That's right.
One account, not more than one.
Let's go ahead and take a look at each of these features,
including publishing eBooks.
Now, it starts with a very interesting royalty structure
in that if you price your eBook
between $2.99
and $9.99,
you will get a 70% royalty
with a little bit of an asterisk next to that.
You actually would get distribution fees pulled away
from it.
Now it depends on how large or how small your eBook file is.
If it's rather large,
they'll pull out more in distribution fees.
If it's rather small, it'll just probably be a few cents.
Anything priced outside the $2 and 99 cents
and $9 and 99 cents,
you'll get 35% royalty,
but the plus, plus side of things, yeah,
is that you have no distribution fees.
Okay. So there's that.
The accepted files include DOC and DOCX,
EPUB, MOBI and PDF.
Some of the other lesser known file types include HTML,
RTF, TXT, and KPF.
Now KPF is an interesting one
because it is a Kindle Direct Publishing platform exclusive
that you can make
through their free software called Kindle Creates.
Now they'll give you the software that you're able
to kind of write your book and format it
and publish it to Kindle Direct Publishing,
but there's a small problem is,
KPF is only read by Kindle Direct Publishing.
So if you plan on staying
on just Kindle Direct Publishing alone
and don't publish anywhere else,
then Kindle Creates and the KPF files are perfect for you.
Another really cool feature is the KDP Cover Creator.
Do you lack any real cash,
or any real skills,
then the Cover Creator is there for you
and you can actually put it all together.
Now, I wouldn't recommend this
to anybody that's trying to make this
into a business and using a Cover Creator,
because you you'll probably want
to hire out a professional designer,
but if you're looking at this as a hobby
or something that you're really not looking
to make a lot of money in,
then the Cover Creator solution is actually pretty nice.
Now, the distribution, this is kind of fun.
There's 13 different regions.
I need to take a nice deep breath.
It includes US, UK, Germany, France, Spain,
Italy, Netherlands, Japan,
Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia and India.
The next feature is something called the KDP Select Program.
It's for eBooks only.
It's an exclusivity agreement
for your eBook that you pretty much say,
"Hey, I'm going to publish this eBook
only on your platform for the next 90 days."
It should be noted.
The agreement only affects eBooks.
It doesn't affect your print book
or your audio book.
And if you have one eBook put into the KDP Select Program,
it doesn't affect the other eBooks.
You're paid per page read
through a library based subscription system
called Kindle Unlimited.
The customer goes, they check out your book,
and any time they read one of your pages,
you're paid a fraction of a cent.
The other perk of KDP Select
is anytime someone checks out that book,
it also influences your Amazon Best Seller Rank.
And you're probably saying, "Hang on a second.
Wait, what?
That's sales, Dale.
And you're talking about a checkout based system?"
Yes, you didn't hear that.
Incorrect here.
It is true.
Anytime someone checks out your book
through Kindle Unlimited,
and you have it enrolled in KDP Select,
it influences your Best Seller Rank.
So you don't have to sell a single book
in order for it to actually be on a Best Seller list.
You also get more royalties in certain regions.
So for instance, Japan normally would have 35%
regardless of that 2.99 to 9.99 price range.
Well, now when you go into KDP Select,
it automatically gives you 70% sans the distribution fees
and you get additional promotional opportunities
that others don't get outside of the KDP Select Program.
Stay tuned to this channel
because KDP Select deserves an entire video
in and of itself so we can kind of do a deeper dive.
Next up, let's talk about publishing print books.
Now the royalty structure
on this is another interesting thing here.
This is a reminder here.
You do not pay for printing your book.
The customer does.
So when you upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing,
somebody buys that book,
they take on the burden.
They settle all the costs of printing out the book.
You don't.
Now in the event that you want
to print out books for yourself
to have on hand or to hand out to family
or to sell to people,
then you can buy it wholesale through your KDP dashboard.
So how the royalties work is this.
It's 60% minus the print fees.
Yeah, it does cost to actually print out your book.
So they're going to need to subtract those print fees.
It varies how much you're going to probably get.
It depends on the number of pages in your book
or the type whether black and white or full color,
and how much you're going to end up profiting in the end.
Sometime it can be anywhere from 35% to as much as 50%
if you price your book competitively.
There is an additional option called Expanded Distribution
to where you get 40% instead of the 60%.
Opting into Expanded Distribution
does not affect the 60% which you'll get
anytime you get a sale through Amazon.
Expanded Distribution is a reach outside of Amazon
to different online retailers
through a company called Ingram Content Group.
It's actually fulfilled
through their subsidiary called Lightning Source.
And what they do is they put it out
to tens of thousands of different online retailers.
And what happens is they will sell something
in their platform.
The sales come through,
Amazon takes 20%,
and then you get the remainder,
which is the 40%.
Stay tuned to this channel
because that deserves an even deeper dive
when it comes to Expanded Distribution,
whether it's worth it or not.
To me, I think it's definitely worth it.
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The accepted file types
when it comes to your print books,
I'm just going to say this.
Don't compromise on it.
PDF. Don't put DOCX, don't put any RTFs,
TXT, HTML, nothing like that, PDF.
They say also accepted is DOC and DOCX,
HTML and RTF.
Don't buy it.
Go with PDF.
Plain with bleed is,
when you have an edge to edge image
or graphics inside the interior
that actually can be cut off.
Now, most books are going to be no bleed,
where they remain inside the margins
and there's no graphic spilling off to the edge of the page.
There are three paper types.
There's 55 pound white and cream paper,
there's 60 pound full color on white paper.
Now just a heads up,
full color printing is real expensive.
You're going to have to actually charge a high premium
on it.
The print quality is pretty good in my opinion,
I've actually found great success with them,
but it does cost a lot.
Keep in mind though,
as of the time of this video,
they right now have In Beta
something called standard color printing.
And it actually is put on, I think 55 pound weight paper.
You can't have a complete saturation of color
from edge to edge,
like say what you would with the normal premium color,
but the cost is substantially lower.
And then much like the eBook publishing,
You have the KDP Cover Creator.
Again, if you're cash strapped,
no skills and you want just a simple solution
or you're a hobbyist, perfect.
Cover Creator's there for you.
How does KDP pay you out?
Okay. So this is how it works.
They pay you out 60 days after the close of each month.
So if you sell books in January,
Then you're going to get paid at the end of March.
If you've sold books in February,
you're going to get paid at the end of April.
They do direct deposit,
wire transfer or check.
If you're outside of the US, UK, Europe, Canada,
Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand,
you'll need to find alternative ways to getting paid
or accepting payment, especially through say direct deposit.
I've heard from some clients
that Payoneer works really nicely.
So the direct deposit,
you don't need to meet any kind of minimum threshold.
So if you sold only a couple of bucks,
they'll just directly deposit that.
Now, when it comes to wire transfers and checks though,
you'll need to have a hundred dollars USD
or 100 of whatever the local currency is
with the exception of say Japan,
where you have to have 10,000 yen
or in Mexico you have to have a thousand pesos.
My thoughts on KDP.
Is it worth it going into 2021?
KDP is a great place to get started in self publishing.
Is it the space that you should probably stay forever?
That's certainly up for debate.
What I would recommend is to make good use of this
and actually turn it into a business.
If you're not a hobbyist,
you're going to want to make you hire out
for cover design and interior formatting.
So that way it's a lot less heartache
and you can really leverage your time
to maybe writing more books or marketing and promoting.
At the end of the day,
you're only going to get out of it
what you put into it.
Not saying that you put thousands of dollars into it
and you're gonna get 2000 back or anything crazy like that.
It's the effort that you put into it.
The most important thing is you shouldn't just publish
and pray through the KDP platform
and hope that, oh they're going to go ahead
and have the algorithm serve out my books to everybody.
No, it's up to you to do the work.
It's up to you to get your books into other hands.
And speaking of getting books into more hands,
did you know about the Amazon Author Central video series
that I've done before?
It's right over here.
You're gonna actually find out
how you can leverage the KDP platform a bit more
when you use an Amazon author profile.
You've already seen that video series,
then you want to take a look at this video.
YouTube says you might be interested in it.
I'll see you on either one of these videos.