How I published a book on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and earned nothing!
I have always dreamt of being a published author. The whole idea of having a book to my name and it being there for posterity felt very romantic to me, just like it does to any aspiring author.
I did not rush in to publishing my book, 'Growling Tales'. I wrote continually on this blog for about 6 years before I gathered the courage to write a book. Finally, the idea struck me to write a book from the perspective of animals. 'Growling tales' is a collection of very short stories which talks about how our deeds affect the lives of animals. I have tried to pen some moving stories trying not to be preachy.
Now, coming to the title of this blog. Below is a list of best practices suggested by experts which I did and did not work in my favour.
1. Research: I spent a good 2 weeks to understand how publishing on Amazon works. I read through blogs, forums, amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) website, twitter handles and anything I could get my hands on.
2. Cover: I designed a decent enough cover for the book. Look at the picture here. Not too bad, right?
3. Reviews: There are close to 25 reviews on Kindle store. Of them most of the reviews are 4.5+ on a scale of 5. My net rating is 4.7
4. KDP Select Enrollment: I enrolled in the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program which gives the book access to a far wider audience for a period of 5 days for the enrollment period. I positioned these 5 days around a weekend as was suggested in one of the blogs.
5. Number of downloads: To be fair to KDP select program, there was a decent number of downloads of the book when it was available for free – 88 Copies to be precise.
6. Number of people who bought the book: All of 6 people bought my book by paying money. Of these 6, I know for sure that 3 people are my dear friends. This means my net effective book buys is just 3!
7. Marketing: I would say I did a decent amount of Marketing for the book on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Kindly search using the hashtag #GrowlingTales and you may see the creative I made using beautiful pictures for different social media channels.
8. Promotional campaign on Amazon: I must admit that I am very stringent on my budgets here. I have hardly spent anything on this. Let’s just say my total spend is way less than 5$ 😊.
Inspite of doing all the above, I did not make any money at all from the book. You can guess the amount from the figures I have mentioned above. Let’s just say that at best, the amount of money I made from the book might buy you a meal from a fine dining restaurant for a maximum of 2 people.
An argument against my lament could be that my book sucks! It is so bad that no one wants to buy. I am not ruling out this possibility. But, the number of free downloads I got in the 5 days period and about close to 25 reviews makes me want to believe that the book is not all that bad.
Also, the book ranked consistently high in its category for quite a lot of time. Even today, if you go to the kindle app and search ‘Animal Stories’, ‘Growling Tales’ shows up at number 21 on page 2 among the 33,629 titles. Better still, if you search ‘Animal Rights’, the book shows up on page 1 at position 6 among the 2259 titles. There were a few days when the book was ranking #1 too in some categories( See the pic below).
There is an expert opinion that one should publish multiple books to get a stream of income from KDP. I am not too convinced about that argument. Reason being all of the above best practices that I did were also expert opinions 😊.
I am immensely grateful to Amazon for realizing my dream. If not for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, my book might not have seen light of the day.
The purpose of writing this blog is to inform the aspiring authors that they should publish a book for the love of writing and not for money. Ofcourse, if the book makes money, great! Consider it as a great windfall. I would have loved it if my book had made a lot of money. But from my experience, looking at publishing book as a source of income might be being a tad bit too optimistic unless you are a known public figure/celebrity/established author.Original link
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