If you read my earlier posts on teaching a class locally for money you'll know that I'm hoping to launch a complimentary ebook to go with it on the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform. Even thought I'm doing the two together, in a sense, it is a completely different process and platform for each. So I'm splitting my posts, one set will follow the class aspect, and this set of posts will follow publishing on KDP.
As I covered in my old post (Can I Teach A Class For Money) I've wanted to self publish for quite awhile. Of course I thought fiction, and I still plan to fulfill that dream someday, but when thinking about my class idea I realized that it wouldn't be that much harder to take my class material and turn it into a non-fiction, how-to type book. A couple months ago, completely by random searches, I discovered a free ebook by Kindle Direct Publish on how to publish using their platform. I downloaded it, since I knew I was interested, but I hadn't read it. Still, I thinking finding that little ebook had planted the seed once again in my subconscious. So I made my decision to dive in, but of course I need to do some research, and that's what this post will cover. These were the first questions I had, and I would think that they are probably common questions asked.
Mainly I was looking at a few different things: How hard was it to publish, what are the royalties, pricing, payments, etc like, some general tips and tricks on how to write the book and get it out there, and pricing my book when I was ready to go live with it. A couple days of some google searches, and a few ebooks (3 to be exact) later and I have a better idea of what to do and where to go.
Publishing
- After reading their small ebook, Publish on Amazon Kindle with Kindle Direct Publishing, it really hit home that it can be a very simple process. Basically a person writes the book in a word document, there are other programs that are compatible but Word is what I have, and then you transfer the document to KDP, and they turn it into an ebook. Simple, yes. Will it really work that way? We'll see, I'm sure there will be formatting issues when the document gets changed from word document to an ebook. For this reason I'm going to keep my document VERY SIMPLE. Minimal pictures, basic text and font, and easy style designs like bullets and asterisk. Hopefully this will eliminate a lot of hiccups during the transformation process.
- Publishing with KDP does come with some limitations on the part of the author. For one they have strict rules on pricing and royalties. Above a certain price gets a higher royalty, below that price gets a lower one. You also are not allowed to offer your book free forever, or even as often as you want. I'll cover these two things further in the post. Overall though the advantages of using KDP far outweigh the few concessions you make so I'm going to use them.
- They also have another ebook that I just found, Building Your Book For Kindle, again put out by the KDP people. I haven't had the chance to read yet, but it's suppose to walk you through creating your word document to be converted to a Kindle Ebook. This should help with those formatting concerns I had. It's already downloaded to my Kindle library and it's next on my reading list.
Pricing and Pay
- Obviously I want to make money off this. I don't know if I'll make a lot, a little, or nothing (hopefully I'll do better than nothing though) but money in the bank is the end goal here. If I were just writing for the joy of writing I would be starting with one of my fiction ideas. So one of the first things I looked at was their royalty structure and payment system.
- If you price your ebook $2.99 or LESS than you are ONLY eligible for a 35% royalty on sales. If you price your book at $2.99 or ABOVE you are eligible to receive a 70% royalty. I don't know what the standard royalties are like for authors who are published traditionally, but to me these seem like fair numbers. That means that if your book is priced at $2.99 and you choose the 70% royalty you'll make $2.09 off each sale. Amazon only takes .90 of that sale. I like those numbers.
- If you are NOT enrolled in the KDP program than you can not price your ebook below $2.99
- The payment system is pretty straightforward and easy to understand, just don't think you'll be getting that bank deposit or check within a week or two. Amazon has a wait time on paying you the money, and it's because they wait for refunds and returns. The wait time is 60 days after the end of the month that you hit their payment threshold.
- If you have a bank account linked to your KDP account then you are eligible for payment when you reach $10 in sales.
- If you do not have a bank account linked to your KDP account then you must reach $100 in sales. I highly recommend you have a savings/checking account linked to your KDP account.
- It credits the money to your KDP account every 30 days, unless you have not reached the threshold and then it will credit it 30 days after you do hit the minimum payout threshold.
- So that means that if you reach your payment threshold in the month of October, you would be issued your payment 60 days later, or around early December.
Writing and Launch Strategy
- I found a really interesting ebook called "How To Write A Non-Fiction Book in 21 Days" by author Steve Scott. Since my goal is to have this book published by October they title caught my eye and I decided to get the book. I've read through the beginning and kind of skimmed through his 21 day plan. I like what I see, and he seems to have solid advice, so I'm going to try and follow his plan as much as possible. I may take longer than 21 days though as I don't have a "traditional" schedule. Really, I have no schedule, when I'm working I'm up all night and sleep through most of the day (I work in a hospital) and when I'm off I flip my schedule over to being up during the day and sleeping at night so I can be with my family. This makes it hard to carve out a specific block of time everyday to dedicate just to writing, which is what he advocates, but I will do my darndest to follow it as much as possible.
- Some might consider it putting the cart before the horse, but I like to have a full plan, or at least idea of what, when and how I'm going to do something. That meant that I wanted a plan in place for my book launch, and pricing my product. Again, I found another Steve Scoot booklet called "Is .99 the New Free? The Truth About Launching and Pricing Your Kindle Books". It's a pretty small booklet, and I read it in around an hour or so. Still, the information was good, and enough that I have a plan in mind.
- I will launch my book free for 5 days, this will hopefully garnish me some exposure, recommendations, and good reviews. After that I will price it at .99 for a short time, not sure how long yet, and hopefully that will get me some legit sales. After that I will go to my regular price of $2.99. I'm hoping the reviews from the free period, and the sales from the .99 period will be enough for Amazon to recommend my book and bump it higher in the search results.
So there's the "grand plan" of my future non-fiction ebook. It's a pretty basic roadmap, but I don't want to get bogged down in to many details before I've even written the thing! My goal with this is to get it done, get it published, and see where it all goes. While I plan to create a quality ebook with quality content it's an experiment as far as a revenue stream. This is the initial testing of the waters, and I fully plan to take what I learn from this quick run through and apply it to my next title, and the next, and the next and so on. Of course I'll be posting regular posts on the process and progress and maybe I'll help someone else down the road launch their title. How cool would that be!
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