Yes!

Well in my experience anyway, and I’ve been an indie author for three years now.  In fact yesterday I removed some of my books from various other sites – from which I had zero sales, and put my books back onto kindle select.

The reason? Well to make money of course.  The main reason for putting books onto other sites, for me, was so that I could get a BookBub deal – which are supposed to be amazing, however, after I think about 30 submissions to BookBub with a no-no response I began to wonder if it was worth it.  I decided ‘no it’s not’ yesterday, took my books off other sites and returned to good old Amazon kindle select kdp.

Here are some interesting things I’ve learnt recently.

• The average indie author only ever sells around 50 books
• People who know how to use Amazon kdp and advertising move out of being an average indie and earn approx $500 per month and sell a lot more than 50 books
• Out of that $500 around $200 will be from kindle pages read

So the answer to… Is Amazon kdp select and advertising worth it… is a very loud yes!

To make sales and earn money… and get good reviews… you need firstly to enroll in kdp select and then you need to advertise.

However, before you follow the steps in my next blog for setting up your own advertisement campaign with Amazon I need to point out some things.

1. The first thing people see is your book cover, if your cover is not eye-catching and appealing then forget about advertising, no amount of pushing your book before people will encourage them to buy if the cover is flat or boring.  There are great cover designers out there, if you want me to suggest a couple then please ask in the notes below.  In my experience you can get a really good professional cover done for approx $100.
2. The Blurb… the blurb… we hates the blurb!  Well I do anyway, again if your blurb isn’t punchy and interesting, and pleasing to the eye (in other words do you know your amazon formatting?) forget it, you can spend $100’s on advertising and no one is going to bite.  I know a really good company that do blurbs but unfortunately they charge $300.  Again, if you would like to know who they are, please ask in the notes below. (ps I’ll tell you a little secret…  I paid $300 for the blurb on my first book, it really is a million times better than anything I could do… however, not being able to pay $300 for all the other books I copied and pasted the formatting they gave me – double dutch jargon that makes your blurb stand out as professional on the Amazon pages, and just changed the words to the other books.  The blurb itself might not be amazing but at least it is presented well ha ha) I suggest you look for help from friends – especially book readers, and also ask several different book clubs, I belong to three book clubs that I really rate on FB, you pop a post on and get invaluable information and help.  This is a good place to put your blurb and listen to the comments that come back.
3. Last, but by no means least, the book itself MUST be a) a gripping story and b) edited to perfection.  I got this wrong with my first book and I so regret publishing before I was ready.  Some readers are vicious, I mean down right uncaring of the years of hard work you’ve put into a book, if the editing is bad they will give you 1* and tell the world your book is not worth reading.  Once that review is on there you can’t get it removed, it is there for eternity and once people see that review you have an enormous amount of work to do to try and correct it.  Please, please, do not list your book until you have had it proof read by a professional.

So, have you got all the above 3 points done?  Then you’re ready to start advertising.  My next blog will be a step-by-step guide to setting up an advert that should make you money.