Amazon’s Kindle platform has been getting a wonderful buzz from authors in both the fiction and non-fiction categories when it comes to income potential. Several authors have turned down 7-figure deals from traditional publishers because their self-published books were so profitable on Kindle.
There are several perks to putting your book on Kindle. Anyone can do it, it’s free, and you reach a very large target audience. You don’t have to get approval from anyone to launch your own book.
Amazon just wants to make sure you created the piece and have full authority to publish it without violating copyright. They do not appreciate the use of private label rights on the site.
Because it doesn’t cost anything, all you’ll need is a word processor (like Microsoft Word) and the ability to create a good ecover. Not all Kindle publications have a cover, but it’s highly recommended since it’s the first impression potential readers have of your book.
As marketers, we’re used to finding products we buy in forums, or via email recommendations from marketers that we follow. But the majority of the world’s consumers go to sites like Amazon to shop for books they need to teach them something, so you won’t be targeting a group that happened to opt into your form online – you get to reach a global audience.
If you submit your book to the Kindle KDP Select program, where you allow Amazon to sell your book exclusively for 90 days, then you get a total of five free promotional days where the public can download your creation free – and often help boost your review count.
It’s important to promote those free days at the myriad of places where readers can log in to see which free books are available for download that day on Kindle. Some of these you need to notify the day of the promotion, but others have to be scheduled up to 4 weeks in advance.
You can also pay to advertise your book on various websites. For example, if you wrote a vegetarian cookbook, then you might want to look into advertising on HappyCow’s website due to the amount of traffic they get each month.
Being an author on Kindle can be a boon to your branding efforts. Having a book there gives you a bit of expertise. Plus, it’s possible that you could be picked up by a traditional publisher for an offer, or asked to contribute to a major media story as an on-set expert.