We are bringing you a case study from Nuria Corby, a writer, and digital marketer the owner of The Home Boss blog. She generated $13 900 passively in December 2021 through creating and selling low-content books and children's books on Amazon KDP.
In this article, we are going through how she was able to set up this kind of passive income and sharing her tips on how to succeed as an Amazon KDP seller.
Getting Started with Amazon KDP
Amazon KDP, also known as Kindle Direct Publishing, is a platform that allows writers and authors to publish their books through Amazon and have their books sold on the platform marketplace as well. Amazon KDP offers a great solution since it not only makes publishing accessible but it also gives writers access to Amazon’s large network of customers.
Amazon controls about 80% of the ebook market globally and tapping into their network can be a great advantage, especially for writers who would like to monetize their publications online.
Nuria started writing, publishing, and selling books on Amazon KDP in November 2019. Back then, she did not make a lot of money through this business but she chose to stick with it, work hard and give it time to mature.
Generating Sales on Amazon KDP
So far, she has created and published 512 low content books total so far but only 30% of the books have got sales. The good thing is that the books that have got sales, do sell on autopilot and generate her passive income each month.
A screenshot of Nuria’s Amazon KDP income report for December 2021
The majority of her books do not sell and this is a very normal scenario for Amazon KDP publishers and sellers. People create thousands of books but only a small percentage of those will get sales and the majority will have no sales. That's just how the business works.
Nuria didn't make any new books in the year 2021 but the passive income kept coming in and actually, it became higher compared to the previous years. This is because her books have become more established and they have received a lot of positive reviews over time. One of her books actually hit the number one bestseller spot for its category and it brings traffic down to the rest of her books.
“The spike you see on the December revenue chart was on the 22nd of December, where I sold over $1 400 worth of books just in one day passively. That was really amazing when that happened…I couldn't believe it when I looked at my report and I saw that I had sold so many books on that day and the amazing thing is that this is true passive income because this is all income from the books that I had already made in the previous year.”, Nuria explains.
Traffic Sources
The majority of Nuria’s sales come from organic searches on Amazon Kindle but she also tries to run some ads on the platform to increase her traffic. Nuria admits that she spent approximately $2 000 on ads during the month of December which boosted her sales a bit but she is also not very good at running the ads. It's her goal for 2022 to master how to run online ads to increase the sales of her books.
“I have a love-hate relationship with ads because I think that they can really boost your sales and I think that when you get to a certain level. It's necessary to run ads but I also don't know very well how to run ads. My ad cost was really high. It was about 35% which is about $2 000. I really don't know how to run them effectively. I kept switching them on and off. If there was a day when my ads were really spending a lot of money, I would get scared and I would switch them off. Then I would regret it afterward and switch them back on again. So it wasn't a very consistent way of running ads and I still don't know what I'm doing but I really need to step up my game and learn more about ads. This is one of the things that I will be doing for 2022 .” Nuria says.
How to Be Successful in the Amazon KDP Business According to Nuria
Nuria has been in this industry full time for 3 years now and through her experience, she has the following tips to share with anyone who would like to get started in the space:
Nuria’s number one tip for anyone interested in getting into the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing business is to create as many books as possible. Low content books are not very difficult to create. Each book can have a maximum of 50-60 pages.
Of course, it's not just about creating many books without considering the quality. Quality always comes before quantity no matter the number of books that you have. But quantity is also very important in this business because you need to make a chunk of books at the beginning to find out what books are selling for you. You can't just make two books and then think that you're going to get sales. You could but it's unlikely. It's much more realistic to make quite a few books to see which ones of your books are going to sell well, and which niches are going to work for you.
“You do need to create quite a few books and as I said, I’ve got a lot of books that never sell. Only 20 to 30% of my books sell. The numbers just fluctuate a little bit but on average it's 20 to 30%. That means that 70 or 80% of my books never sell and those are a lot of books. So don't be discouraged and think this business doesn’t work when you have 30 books and you don’t get any sales. I had 30 books when I first got my first sales but you know it could be any amount it just depends on whether you have found a niche or a type of book or design that is going to sell well for you.”, Nuria explains.
In this business, you need to put in the work with consistency. There is no overnight success story here. It takes time and consistent effort to be able to pile up a number of books that can surely generate you passive income in the following years.
“If you start now, by next year you could be at this point. I think the difficulty appears when people want quick results while putting in very little effort. People want things to work straight away and this is not how this business works and not how any business works.”, Nuria says.
The tip is to keep creating books on a consistent basis. If you create and publish 20 low content books per month, at the end of the year you could have 240 books. Which is not a bad number. You can also choose to outsource the creation of the books but you need to be ready to pay for the outsourcing expenses.
It’s really important to create unique books that are different from the other books on Amazon. It's fine to create notebooks, gratitude journals, diabetic logbooks, and the likes when you're first starting because you're learning how to do it, but once you know how to create a book, make books that are different. You need to find some kind of twist to your book by either making it funny because humor really sells on Amazon or making it a gift book. Or something that people can gift for Christmas, birthdays, mother's day, and such.
Running ads is very important to get traffic flowing to your book’s sales page. However, it is something that Nuria doesn’t suggest to do at the beginning but rather when you have got a book that clearly sells. You should always use ads to boost the sales of a book that is getting traction.
“If you're just at the beginning and you haven't made any money from KDP yet, then I would say don't start running ads because they can quickly eat up your budget. And if you don't know what you're doing they don't always help to get sales. What I would say is once you have made a few sales look into ads learn as much as you can. Organic traffic is good but if you want to go to the next level, ads can take you there level.”, Nuria explains.
- Go Through Reader’s Reviews
Another way to take your Amazon KDP business to the next level is to understand what your buyers want. Don't make books without a strategy. Always do your research very well by looking at what people are buying online, and what they want to buy. You can do this by looking at reviews for the books that are already on Amazon and see what people are saying about them.
There are always ideas that you can get from those reviews because sometimes people say things like, they really like the book but I wish it was available in a smaller size so I can fit it into my handbag or some people say they really like the book but it's too small and there's not enough space to write in. That gives you an idea for your next book.
Conclusion
Amazon KDP can be a good passive income source for writers, content creators, and digital marketers as we have seen from Nuria Corby who earned over $13 900 in a single passively. The most important thing with it is to keep creating more books. The bigger your portfolio gets, the higher your chances of making a lot of money.
If you are interested to read guides on how to start, you can check them out on Nuria’s website, thehomeboss.com.
