- At $27.2 million in the KDP Select Global Fund,
one would be led to believe
that publishing through Kindle Direct Publishing
is definitely profitable.
But there is a vast majority of people
that aren't even touching even a fraction
of that $27 million in February of 2020.
So what gives?
Is Kindle Publishing still profitable in 2020?
Yes or no?
Find out all that in today's episode, so stay tuned.
- Hey, I'm Dale L. Roberts,
the best selling author as a self-publishing advocate
who wants to show you,
how to publish books that sell.
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Is Kindle Publishing still profitable in 2020?
Yes or no?
I hate to say that this would be a rather short video
if I just told you yes or no
because it really requires more insights,
deeper thinking about this
Kindle Direct Publishing launched back in late 2007,
and really got going in 2008.
But it didn't pick up too much popularity
until about 2010 to 2015.
It what was called the Kindle publishing Gold Rush
where everyone and their mother was putting out a book
and profiting hand-in-fist,
organic sales were King,
you could put out just about any type
of hammered garbage onto the market
and just make a lot of money.
And there were some people pulling in
five to six figures per month in earnings.
This is lucrative, making 10,000 $100,000 per month,
putting out just about anything
and there wasn't really any kind of marketing
or promotion strategy.
That was the day when you could just put everything out
and you could really make some serious money.
You target a niche or keyword and profit.
Wow, that was pretty freaking awesome.
But this giant shift happened in July of 2015.
It was just about a month prior to that,
that Amazon started to detect some fake reviews
being put on there
by way of what's called review swaps.
It's a quid pro quo system of an author
exchanging a book with another author
so they can actually have reviews on each of their books.
Well, then it started getting outsourced
to virtual assistants
and eventually became just this wildfire
of nothing but fake reviews being put on books.
So they started clamping down,
they started shutting down privileges to people
for leaving reviews,
they were taking reviews off of books.
So this loophole was being closed up.
Well, the other loophole still remained
and that was through the KDP select program.
Now, as I'd mentioned, in February 2020,
the KDP Select Global Fund was $27.2 million
and it wasn't quite that much back then.
I think it was probably closer to 15
to $20 million per month at that point.
And it's a big pool that is shared amongst people
that have their book enrolled in exclusive program.
And anytime someone checked it out back then,
if a reader read at least 10% of your E-book,
you would get paid a certain percentage
of the global select fund.
And that generally ran about a buck 30 to a buck 40,
sometimes upwards of a buck 50
depending on how many people were enrolled
and how large the global select fund was.
Now you can see the problem,
people were putting out these small pamphlets.
And they were getting paid the same
as someone who was putting out a giant novel.
And it didn't make sense.
I mean, you're reading 10% of a 1000 page manuscript,
and then one page of a 10 page manuscript
that doesn't quite equate
and so there was enough complaints
to KDP to change the system
and they did to what's right now happening is called KENPC
The Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count,
meaning this was how they averaged out
the number of pages For your given an E-book,
and then you were paid per page read in the system.
So a lot of people started bailing on the system July 2015.
They're like deuces, this isn't as easy as it used to be.
And on top of that,
the algorithm was becoming more sophisticated.
You couldn't just grab any old keyword,
and you couldn't put a bunch of reviews
on your book and expect to get organic sales.
So the fact of the matter is to even to this day,
the Amazon algorithm becomes more smart.
It learns more from the customer behavior
and the buy patterns and search patterns.
So it's become so much more difficult.
So here's how it is now
before we used to just publish Kindle E-books through KDP.
But now we have KDP print.
We used to have CreateSpace to publish our print books
and that was an Amazon owned company,
but it had merged with KDP to make KDP print
in December of 2018.
Now why is this important to the conversation?
Well, Kindle publishing
is no longer just publishing E-books.
Now you have print books
and it's all in one dashboard
instead of two separate ones.
And now more than ever,
writers need to do a few things
in order to become successful.
The first thing is they need to have and grow a following.
If you expect to publish and pray for the best
and have a tour, Amazon's going to give you an audience,
that's not gonna happen.
You need to come with people to the party
in order for Amazon to say, oh okay, well,
we're gonna go ahead and start to push this book.
The next thing is marketing and promotion.
It is a given,you have to market and promote your book
and you need to do it indefinitely.
You need to keep doing it
and don't stop doing it, needs to be ongoing.
So while you're writing your upcoming book,
you're promoting your current one,
and it's just a rental-repeat thing that you have to do.
Speaking of writing your upcoming book
you need to produce content
and feed the beast.
Because Amazon loves products,
the more products you can feed it,
the more relevance you build in its algorithm
and it gets it to where Oh, wow, this author has six books.
And this one's doing really well.
Well, I'll go ahead and recommend these other books
because clearly someone's enjoying this.
Feed the beast, continue to produce content.
Give reviews all right,
give reviews the legit way all right,
Find out who your audience is.
Have them buy your books
and ask them to provide honest reviews on Amazon's platform.
You need to ask people for it
and it's important that you don't coerce them
into putting any type of review on
just ask that they leave an honest review.
There should be also like the marketing and promotion
in end of things.
Need to add that in there
and getting reviews on a regular basis for your books.
And also, this is inevitable.
It is a pay-to-play world.
I mentioned marketing and promotion.
But some of it requires that you have to invest.
And Amazon advertising,
is the most dead-simple way doing things
and it can be somewhat cost effective.
If you know what you're doing.
We've got plenty of videos
about Amazon advertising on this channel,
you can just simply look for those.
So is Kindle publishing still profitable in 2020?
Yes or no? and I'm gonna say yes,
but not without those best practices
I previously mentioned,
if you think that it's going to be profitable
by just publishing it on there,
and Amazon's gonna serve it on a silver platter
to their audience,
you're gonna be sorely mistaken.
So yes, Kindle publishing
is still very much profitable in 2020.
And speaking of Kindle publishing,
I mean, his Kindle direct publishing all that bag of chips.
In fact, I did a deep dive this year, about KDP.
Is KDP worth it in 2020?
Well, we'll find out in the very next video,
so make sure you click on it, I'll see you there.