Since 2018,
I've published 2,439 books on Amazon.
And during that time sold over 70,000 books.
And the types of books I'm talking about are the no content and low content
books. And these include books like notebooks, journals, diaries,
puzzle books, and coloring books. And over that time,
I've learned quite a number of things about this business.
But what I want to do today in this video is share with you three of the most
important things I've learned,
which I think will help you on your journey to self-publishing on Amazon.
Now,
if you've not been to this channel before then welcome my name's 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. If you do like videos like that,
then please do give it a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell.
So one of the big things that I did learn,
the first thing was that Amazon is basically a search engine,
very similar to Google or even YouTube.
The only difference being is that on Google people are searching for
information, whereas on Amazon, people tend to search for things to buy.
But the same principles of SEO or search engine optimization
apply to books as much as they do to websites on Google.
And it actually took me about a year to work this out.
And when I did and applied some of those search engine optimization principles,
that's when I saw an uptick in my sales.
And there were basically two main components to this SEO and that was niche
choice and keyword choice. And first of all, niche choice, well,
what is a niche? Well it's ust a subject or type of book. So for instance,
coloring books and kids handwriting books would be examples of two different
niches.
And what I found was was that you've got those very popular niches,
like adult coloring books. A lot of people buy them.
They sell very well and make their publishers a lot of money.
But there is one problem and that is,
they are very popular and therefore very competitive.
So in order to get your book seen on Amazon and ranked on
that first page, which is where we want to be,
because that's gonna get most of the traffic and most of the eyeballs on your
books,
you're probably going to have to run an advertising campaign on Amazon ads,
which will cost money.
You're also probably going to need to direct traffic from outside Amazon
to your book. And that could come from things like, you know, your own website,
Facebook or Pinterest. And it will take time.
It'd probably take a couple of years getting sales from these sources
to eventually get your book to rank organically for a niche such as adult
coloring books. Then you have the other end of the spectrum.
And an example of this might be something like 17th century French poetry books.
Not a lot of competition.
So it'd be very easy to get your book ranked highly on that first page on
Amazon, when someone searches for these types of books. However,
the sales would be very small. And in fact,
looking at the best seller's ranks of the books that list on that page,
you probably would be lucky to make, you know,
one sale every three to four months.
So the big thing that I learned that helped me a lot was to go for that middle
ground. And that is books that sold well,
but didn't have a lot of competition.
And what I learned was that it was better to go for lots of these
different niches that kind of flew under the radar, sold well,
didn't have a lot of competition.
And each of these niches brought in a moderate number of sales per month,
but they all added up to a lot of sales per month.
And then we come onto the keyword choice,
which is very similar to the niche choice.
And the keywords are those search terms that people put when they're searching
for something to buy on Amazon. And likewise with niches,
you get keywords that are very popular.
A lot of people search for those keywords and because they are popular,
there's a lot of competition. So again,
getting your book ranked for those particular search terms may be difficult.
And again, likewise with the niches,
you've got those keywords that are not popular and are very easy to rank for,
but don't bring any sales. So again,
I learned that it's best to go for that middle ground.
And I came up with some criteria that found those particular keywords.
And so you've got a moderate number of sales,
but were able to rank highly on the first page for those keywords. And in fact,
I've done a video on how I choose my keywords,
which I'll leave a link to down below in the description. Now,
the second important thing that I've learned over this time is that
book cover design is critical.
The book cover is the equivalent of a headline on a newspaper or magazine cover
or sales page. It's designed to grab customers attention, draw them in,
get them to click on your book and hopefully hit that buy button.
And I found that there's quite a number of components involved in designing a
book cover. But I found that there are, there are three main components.
The first being font choice.
The text on your book has to be readable even on those small
thumbnail images that you'll find on a mobile device.
And so font choice is essential.
And a font choice is also important when it comes to the niches because some
fonts are more suitable to some niches than others.
And I often see people do pick the wrong font for the niche,
which looks odd.
It doesn't look right when people are looking at books and they'll just bypass
that particular book. So for instance,
a font choice for a kid's handwriting book would be different than say a font
choice for a gratitude journal or prompt journal,
which tend to use more script or handwritten type fonts.
The next thing was the color of the book. And again,
I found that this is vital because the book has to stand out.
And as I said before, grab a customer's attention.
And a lot of this can be done with color choice. In fact,
it's so important I recently did a video on this again,
which I'll leave a link to in the description below.
And then you put all these components together,
and this is a third part and that's the arrangement.
It's the arrangement of the text on the cover and the images.
And there are some basic graphic design rules.
And so this is important to make the cover look aesthetically pleasing.
So the font has to be in a certain position and also the images
have to be in a position that looks pleasing. There is some balance to it.
I see so many books where the text isn't even centered on the cover of the book
and the images are just thrown on there randomly.
So books look very amateurish and again,
customers just scroll past them and go for books that look more professional.
And then we come on to the third thing that I learned,
and this is probably the most important thing.
And that is consistency. I want you to imagine for the moment,
if you were to say,
go on a gym program to maybe put on muscle lose weight or improve your
cardiovascular fitness. You would follow some rules,
maybe even buy a program or a book to tell you what to do.
And you would follow that program. Well, hopefully you would for, you know,
three, four days a week,
if it's a diet maybe every day of the week and you would do that week after
week, and you may find after a few months, someone goes to you, you know, Hmm.
You know, you look like you've lost a bit of weight or you've,
you've put on a bit of muscle.
And so similar principles apply to creating and publishing
books and for any online business for that matter.
And that is the consistency.
One of the common things I read on the comments on this channel go along the
lines of two months ago, I published two,
three books. I've not made any sales help. What have I done wrong?
Well, it's not so much that you've done something wrong.
It's what you didn't do. That was the issue.
And that was create more books and create them regularly
because when you do that and you aim to improve slightly
on each book, and you'll also learn the principles like keyword use,
niche choice, cover design,
how to structure titles and subtitles properly.
It's when that all comes together,
that you then start to make the breakthrough of sales,
but it doesn't come about after just making one or two books,
it comes about after making books regularly, and then seeing which ones.
Get a bit of traction, which ones make sales.
And with each book improving by a small amount so that you can
create, refine, improve,
and hopefully make that breakthrough to eventually start making sales.
And it's the exact same process that I went through. I started in June,
2018 and it wasn't until August,
2018 that I started bringing in my first royalties.
And I think it was round about 12 to $13 in that month.
Now I could have easily said, wow, I put in three months work,
all I've made is 12 to $13. This is not for me, go on to next business.
And in fact,
I've done quite a few online businesses where I've done exactly that.
But I learned that the breakthrough came with that consistent production of
books and not giving up,
but maintaining that focus and maintaining that commitment and just pushing
through. And I found that people that do that,
people that contact me and that do that have had that breakthrough,
have made those sales and have gone on to make, you know,
full-time incomes producing these books on Amazon.
So you've got the treat Amazon as a search engine.
You've got the cover design and you've got that consistency.
I think if you were to take those three points, initially,
you would make big strides into making those regular sales,
maybe one day building this into a good second income,
or even as I've done into a full time income.
I hope you found that useful and interesting.
If you did give it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button.
Thank you very much for your time. It is very much appreciated.
And until next time, goodbye.