- Are you thinking about publishing
to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform,
and not sure if it's gonna be a proper fit for you?
Well today's video, I'm gonna go ahead and take a deeper
dive in the Kindle Direct Publishing explain,
is KTP worth it in 2020, stay tuned.
(gentle tones)
Hey, I'm Dale L Roberts, a best-selling author,
as well as the self-publishing advocate
who wants to show you how to publish books that sell.
If you want that too, make sure you click the subscribe,
ring the belt notification icon,
and switch it to all,
so that way you don't miss a single one of these videos.
Stick around to the end,
because I'm gonna discuss why,
or why you wouldn't want to use
the Kindle Direct Publishing platform,
and also I'm gonna give you a free resource.
If you happen to be new to this business,
it'll help kinda navigate some of the waters,
and understand some of these other minute details,
that I won't quite go over in this video.
First of all, what is Kindle Direct Publishing?
Well, otherwise known as KDP,
in the land of self-publishing,
this actually started about 2008,
and it really started to blossom and grow, going into 2013,
when we saw a really big boom.
It's what a lot of people refer to
as the Kindle publishing rush.
A lot of people were rushing into it,
to actually publish e-books,
that was when it was just an e-book publishing platform.
You fast-forward to today,
it actually has e-books and print books.
How does KDP work?
Well, you actually have to prepare
a lot of your stuff in advance,
so don't expect to go to the platform,
and have them handhold you,
so you're gonna actually have to write your own content,
you're gonna have to format it,
you're gonna need to have your manuscript ready to go,
you're gonna need e-book cover,
you're gonna need a print cover,
and also you're gonna need other things, such as,
you're gonna need to have a formatted manuscript,
and you're gonna need to have your metadata in order.
Now, if you hear me say the word metadata,
that refers to everything that pretty much describes
your publication, that's going to be your title,
your subtitle, your book description,
any kinda related keywords, so it's more discoverable,
any type of categories, your author name, and so much more.
So let's go ahead and talk about the KDP royalty structure,
how much are you going to get paid
if you're using this platform?
So something I didn't mention before is it's 100% free
to use KDP, that's right I'm not mincing any words,
there's no trickery here, it's 100% free.
But it does come at a cost,
because you're not gonna get 100% of all royalties.
So let's start it out with the e-books,
because that's what KDP had originally started with,
and you actually get global distribution
to over 40 different sales territories.
That's just a huge, huge,
wide array of places that you can reach,
that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do just on your own,
and remember, this is going to the Amazon platform,
so that means there's a ready-made audience
just coming for content,
as opposed if you were to try to
fulfill this on your own website,
without any real following,
you're gonna have to drive all that traffic in there.
With that being said,
that's why their e-book sales royalty structure's
a little bit hard to grasp,
but stay with me here for just a second.
You get to go ahead and set your e-book pricing,
but it's gonna be too specific royalty structures.
The first one is 35%, now you get 35% of all sales.
Now this is when you are priced outside the sweet spot.
I'm gonna get to that in just second here.
Now when you have it priced outside of that sweet spot,
you do have the 35% royalty,
and they will also subtract any kind
of applicable regional sales taxes, otherwise known as VAT,
rather than me going through each one of the regions,
and saying how much VAT is, in each one of those,
you probably could just go into your dashboard
when you go to upload, and figure that out on your own.
Now here comes the sweet spot, which is the 70% royalty.
This is what gets everybody sitting up at attention,
like 70%, that's great, 70 cents out of every dollar,
you're gonna bring home.
Now there's two exceptions, they will take out, again,
the applicable regional sales taxes, known as VAT,
as well as what's called a delivery fee.
The delivery cost is roughly fifteen cents per megabyte,
and they say a minimum of one cent
is going to be charged for delivery fees.
So if you got a really really tiny file,
that it's not even quite up to a fraction of a megabyte,
they're still gonna go ahead and charge you
a one cent delivery fee, and that's just in the US,
it varies per region.
So what exactly is this whole sweet spot I refer to?
Now KTP doesn't call it the sweet spot, I just call it that,
it's where they want you to price between 2.99, and 9.99.
If you're priced outside of $2.99 and $9.99
that's when they push you down to 35%.
Why do they do that?
Well, chances are likely Amazon did some tests,
and they discovered that their audiences,
and their customers are most likely to buy
at a $2.99 to $9.99 price point.
So that's why they want to reward you for doing that.
So just remember that if you want to price your book
considerably higher than $9.99,
that's gonna put you in the 35% royalty range,
meaning that you're gonna get 35 cents out of every dollar,
and if you're within the 2.99 to 9.99, that's 70%,
so if we're outside of it,
and you wanna get to a break-even point, above 9.99,
you're gonna actually have to price your book $19.99
to see the same amount you would get priced at $9.99.
Hmm, crazy right?
So, if you were to try to do it $14.99,
you're gonna end up losing money,
you and might as well just go ahead
and put it back into the sweet spot,
or jack up the price considerably,
that's completely your call,
especially if your audience is willing to pay that.
Next up is the KDP Select program.
Now this is a very unique program,
and it's actually an optional
90-day exclusivity agreement.
Now I said optional,
a lot of people think that they have to use it,
you don't have to use it.
To be clear, that if your e-book is opted-in
to this 90-day exclusivity agreement,
for the KDP Select program,
this doesn't include your print book,
it does not include your audiobook.
So don't worry if for some reason you wanna put your e-book
into to KDP Select,
this doesn't affect distribution of your print book,
or your audiobook,
you can put those on any platform you wish.
But if you do enroll into the KDP Select program,
you are agreeing to stay exclusively on Amazon KDP,
and will not publish in other areas like Apple,
Barnes & Noble Kobo, Kobo, Google Play Books,
and so much more.
Here's their incentive,
something I didn't mention in the royalty structure
was there are some regions,
that will just give you 35%
regardless of you being in the sweet spot.
Now, that changes though when you opt in the KDP Select,
because then you get globally into the 70% region,
if you're staying within that sweet spot,
which can be kinda nice, especially if you say,
get your book over into Japan where it's normally 35%,
but you get into KDP Select,
it'll increase it into the 70% region.
So this is how the KDP Select program works.
It's actually a subscription-based service,
for the customers, and it's,
think of it kinda like a library,
and there's two programs they have,
one of them is called Kindle Unlimited,
and the other ones called Kindle Owners' Lending Library.
And part of that membership allows them to check out
any book that is enrolled in KDP Select.
You are then paid by the pages read, by the customer,
so the more pages they flip through, the more you get paid,
and it comes from a subscription-based pool,
kind of global fund,
it's actually called the KDP Select Global Fund,
and it's done on a monthly basis,
and it roughly comes out to little less
than half a cent per page.
Recently, I think it was at at about $27 million
for the month, but you have to think,
this is dispersed amongst millions of titles,
that are enrolled in the KDP Select program.
Now here's the really cool thing, is you're rank,
your Amazon Best Seller Rank,
will be influenced by the checkouts.
So anytime someone checks out your book,
it will increase your Amazon Best Seller Rank,
it's what I call the unfair advantage,
and the reason why it's unfair,
is you don't have to have a single sale,
and you could be a number one bestseller.
It's just that simple.
You can get enough checkouts,
that can influence your Amazon Bestseller Rank,
it's kinda wonky if you ask me.
I talk a little bit more about it in my KDP Select review.
I'll talk about that, at the end of the video.
They also have two unique book promotions,
in the free book promotion,
as well as the Kindle countdown deal.
KDP print books, now this came right around about 2016 ish,
CreateSpace was still around,
it was an Amazon owned company,
and eventually ended up merging with KDP print books
on September 2018,
and it has been since about December of 2018,
that CreateSpace completely shuttered,
and it's now all KDP print books.
So, we've talked about the e-books,
now we got a shift over to print books,
because it's a completely different model,
even though you can publish through the same dashboard,
your e-book and your print book,
how you're paid is different,
how the product is seen is different.
So that you don't have any kinda ambiguity on this one,
the print books are strictly paperback books, all right?
They're just paperback, so you're not gonna get a hardcover,
and you're not gonna get a hardcover with a jacket,
and you're not gonna get anything spiral-bound,
it's just paperback, and they've got glossy,
and matte finish, they have white and cream colored paper,
and they have about 15 trim sizes.
Can go anywhere from say a five by eight,
to an eight and a half, by 11, and a few sizes in between,
and if you wanna to, a custom size,
although that does limit your distribution,
if you do a custom size.
So how does the royalty structure work?
All right, so here's how it works.
They say it's 60% royalty,
so you're supposed to get 60 cents out of every dollar,
but you got a subtract print costs, because obviously,
you're not having to pay anything upfront,
and any time a customer orders something,
there needs to be print costs.
It's gonna cost amazon money to run it through a printer,
and get it all done, so the print costs are subtracted,
and also, the number of pages
will influence how much those print costs are,
and I think it's 108 pages or less,
regardless of the trim size, will be a static amount.
Once you go beyond that, it's about a cent,
to two cents per page added to that.
So you're gonna wanna make sure
you're pricing your book accordingly,
so you at least make some type of a profit.
So if you have some type of a thick novel, 800 pages,
then chances are likely,
that you're not gonna make very much.
Generally speaking, I see about 35%,
to 50% royalty for each sale of the print books.
Now this is based on how many pages again,
and what I put the pricing at.
So it's going to vary, so if I've got a smaller book,
that if priced a little bit higher,
then my percentage is obviously gonna look a little higher.
Distribution goes out to nine different regions,
and this includes the US, UK, Germany, France,
Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada, and Australia,
and it trickles down into some smaller regions,
that actually feed out from these larger ones.
The next option they have
is something that's called expanded distribution.
Now this one used to be kinda an x-factor,
if you were to call,
and get ahold of someone over at the KDP print team,
sometimes they're like, "I don't know who does it."
They don't know, we just tick this box,
and it goes out to thousands
of different online distributors, and I did some digging,
and I came to find out that actually,
the people that are fulfilling the expanded distribution
are kinda of middleman for Amazon KDP,
and they're actually called Ingram Content Group,
and more popularly known by their other offshoots,
of Ingram Spark and Lightning Source.
So they send out your book to tens of thousands
of different online retailers,
including places like Walmart, and Target.
So, if you've ever wanted to get yourself listed
on walmart.com, then you know,
just go ahead and select expanded distribution.
Now keep in mind that the royalty rate
is significantly less, believe it's right about 45%,
I'll put something on the screen if I'm wrong,
and that is gonna subtract the print cost as well,
remember the page count's gonna influence that too.
Marketing and promotion.
Okay so I talked about KDP Select actually having
some promotional features in it,
and the free book promotions,
as well as the Kindle Countdown Deal.
Now, when you utilize those two specific avenues,
might I recommend that you don't just
fire off these promotions,
you're gonna wanna do some type of e-mail marketing,
social media marketing,
any type of getting out and promoting it
beyond just trying to fire it off, and expect the best.
There used to be a day when you could fire off
a Kindle book promotion, be it through the free version,
or Kindle Countdown Deal, and you would just, you know,
see a ton of downloads,
and see it influence the direction of your book
after the promotion, but those days are gone,
there's just a ton, there's a lot,
millions of e-books being uploaded every day to KDP.
So, you're not gonna get very much traction,
and don't expect Amazon to go ahead
and promote this for you.
It is on you to promote the promotion.
And also a very fun little thing actually it's
called Amazon Advertising,
which integrates with Kindle Direct Publishing.
It is a pay-to-play world here folks,
there used to be a point you could put up something,
and just rain down money.
Those days are gone,
you're gonna actually have to invest in things,
and Amazon Advertising is pretty interesting.
If you've ever used Google, or Facebook Ads,
or YouTube ads, it's nothing like those,
it's way easier right now, and it is actually,
probably the easiest, and cheapest way to market your books,
but understanding it, it's a little bit more complex,
especially if you're new to marketing,
what I would recommend is if you use Amazon advertising,
don't invest money that you aren't willing to lose it first.
So if you start to use Amazon advertising
by way of KDP, then go into it slowly.
Start out with low cost per click,
as well as a low budget per day.
When I mean low budget we're talking like 10,
to as low as $1 per day,
with a cost per click of 10 to 15 cents.
This is a way for you to kinda understand
the platform better,
and get to know exactly how it functions,
rather than going on to it,
putting $1,000 per day budget on something,
and a cost per click of $1.00,
it's not gonna get you anywhere,
then a little bit of heartache, and an empty bank account.
So is Kindle direct publishing worth it in 2020? (sighs)
Well look, it's free to use, it's got wide reach,
and has a decent royalty structure, and folks,
it's good for newbies, if you are new to this business,
give it a shot, just try at least one publication.
Now, I just wanna let you know, it's not for everyone,
if you already have a following,
like a good friend of mine Ashley Christ,
she didn't have to use the platform,
because she already had the following,
and she went ahead self-fulfilled everything,
and she was able to collect all of the profits,
not have to worry about going through the,
did she get as wide as reach,
as she would done through Amazon?
No, but she knew her needs,
and she just wanted to fulfill that through her audience.
So I want you to think to yourself,
do I want the wide reach?
Okay, great, do you already have the following?
If you don't, then you might wanna consider
going over to Amazon KDP.
Would you like to learn how to break ground
in self-publishing through Amazon KDP?
I've got good news for you,
I've actually put together
the DIY publishing course for beginners,
you can take it look at a down over there,
(bell rings) and visit there,
it's 100% free, and you actually can learn
all the very basics of how to self-publish
through Amazon KDP.
And also, while we're talking about it,
I told you about KDP Select program,
is it really worth it in 2020?
I talk in depth about it, go and visit this next video,
I'll see you there, what are you waiting for click it.