Hey everyone and welcome to today's video,
where I'm going to show you my Amazon KDP earnings for self-publishing no
content and low content books on the Amazon platform.
We'll have a quick look at the breakdown of the earnings, the expenses,
including advertising,
followed by a few of the common but great questions you guys often ask,
which is how many books do you need to publish to create a full time income?
Do you need to run ads to sell books and is this business over
saturated? But before we do that, first of all, welcome to the channel,
my name's 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.
And if you do like videos like that, then please do give it a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell to receive
notification of when I produce more videos like this. Okay.
Now, for those of you new to self-publishing on Amazon,
when you sell a book for say $6.99,
which is a common price point for most low content books,
Amazon takes its fees off that amount.
These fees include the cost of printing and putting the book together,
along with the cost of shipping it to the customer.
What's left is your money or your royalties,
which Amazon pays you direct into your bank account once a month.
So for example, for $6.99 book, that is approximately $1.90 in profit.
If we go to the KDP dashboard,
we can see the sales over the last three months,
which have been relatively consistent.
To get our total royalties for 2021 we click here to go to the
KDP reports beta.
And here we can see the total amount in royalties I was paid from
the sales of my books,
which was $61,282 and 46 cents.
Now most books made a profit of $1.90.
So that equates to total sales of around 32,000 books. Not bad.
However, before we get too excited,
we still have to take our expenses off that amount.
If we take a quick look at the breakdown of my top selling 11 books,
we can see that they brought in $51,428
and 53 cents. That's about 84% of my total revenue.
So,
does that mean you can go and publish 11 books and expect to make this amount?
The simple answer is no, which brings me to the first common question I get.
How many books do I need to publish to make a full-time income?
And I'm afraid the answer is, it all depends.
How much is your full-time income?
What niches are you planning on publishing in? What are your plans, if any,
for promotion of your books and what are your skills in terms of niche research,
keyword research, and book cover design.
You can see that since I started publishing in 2018,
I created a total of 2,229 books.
Did my early books sell? Some did, but the majority of them didn't.
You see, I was a total beginner,
like many of you and learning the business in terms of cover designs, and niche.
Research and keyword research.
They taught me about a year to learn these skills and come up with a formula,
which I teach on this channel to start making consistent sales.
I'm afraid it's not a get rich quick scheme and requires hard work and learning.
And there are lots of resources out there such as YouTube, Skillshare,
Udemy, where you can learn many of these skills. You know,
I wouldn't go on say a writing course and expect to write a bestseller with my
first book. Now, out of these top selling 11 books,
I had run ads on only three of them.
The others included my best selling book brought in a nice passive income,
which is of the things I love about this business.
So let's get onto the actual expenses.
My biggest expense was Amazon ads, which will come to in a moment.
The others are things like software. I bought Affinity Designer early last year,
which I used for creating the book covers and interiors,
and also the thumbnails for this channel. It cost around $50.
At the time I pay around $9 a month for creative Fabrica,
which is an absolute bargain. And I use that for getting images, KDP book,
interiors, and fonts.
Other common expenses may include one-off payments for things like Tangent
Templates, Publisher Rocket,
or subscriptions to tools like Helium 10 and Book Bolt.
So let's take a look at my spend on Amazon ads for the last year.
Now it won't allow me to show you the expenses for 2021.
Only for my total spend since I started advertising back in 2020.
So $25,000 is not my ad spend for last year.
I went through each month and put the monthly spend in a spreadsheet.
And the total spend on ads was $18,616 and
77 cents, which actually quite surprised me. I didn't think it was that much.
Now that isn't all paid at once.
The bill for ads comes through usually twice a month or so,
and I pay it from the profits I make from my books. Now, a common question,
do you actually need to run ads to succeed at this business?
Absolutely not. As I mentioned, I only ran ads on three of my books. Last year.
One was quite recent in the competitive monthly budget planner niche. Again,
it all depends on your niche and whether you have found less competitive
sub-niches or keywords within a niche. For example,
If you were to create a generic adult coloring book.
In order to get your books seen and make sales,
I would almost certainly say you would need to run ads. Now,
most of my books are in really boring niches,
like financial log books and planners. Not glamorous,
but they do sell well and sell consistently and rarely require ads unless it's
competitive like the budget planner niche I just mentioned.
Now it took me around 18 months of publishing before I decided to dip
my toe in the Amazon ads water.
So my advice is this learn the skills and make sales before getting
into ads. Too many people create.
Say an adult coloring book as their first.
Book,
want to run ads on it and ask me how much they should spend on ads. Now,
realistically,
you are probably looking at a few thousand dollars a month minimum,
and unless your book is good enough it still might not get traction.
And promotion of books doesn't have to be just ads.
It can be building a website and an Instagram page to promote the books.
As one viewer did last year.
She created books in the outdoor pursuits niche and within around six months was
making 10 to 15,000 dollars a month, which is incredible.
Now this is a strategy I'm actually going to be pursuing this year and creating
a whole brand. Okay. So the all important figure,
my KDP earnings for 2021.
Now total royalties minus the ad spend and minus,
let's say $300 for other expenses leaves a grand total of
$42,365 and 69 cents for the
year.
Now that may not be as much as other online incomes you see,
or other KDP incomes for that matter, but it's pretty decent.
For many people that may be the equivalent of, or more than a yearly income.
But it is largely a passive income and has allowed me the time to pursue other
business interests,
including this YouTube channel and turn my side income into a full-time
income. Now in 2021,
I didn't actually create as many books as I would've liked to have done due to
time spent on this channel and personal factors like emigrating to another
country. Now is KDP oversaturated. Is it dead?
And is this a waste of your time? I would say no.
And I've heard this so many times over the years in every online business,
including YouTube Merch by Amazon, podcasts, newsletters, blogs,
eBay. But people still continue to create profitable businesses in them
like the example I gave above.
I think people who say it's dead are either lazy think it's too much work or
haven't learnt the skills required to create good products and so have never
made sales. If you're willing to, you know, to create quality and be consistent,
then there's no reason why you can't achieve similar results, if not better.
Now, if you are new to KDP self publishing,
then check out this video here where I walk you through, step by step,
to creating and publish your very own simple line notebook to get you started.
Thank you very much for your time. It's very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time and goodbye.