Truth About Kindle and IM

The Horrible Truth About Kindle and IM

 

So I have been playing around with Kindle for a couple of years already. Only part time to create a nice second stream of income. I´ve been investigating various niches, and have a lot of new cutting edge “kindle programs” on my computer. Most of them are plain stupid!

The vast majority are trash, repeated crap… without any knowledge of the Kindle platform. Some internet marketers or let´s call them “authors” don´t seem to have published a single eBook on kindle themselves. Most of these courses seem to be copies of previously published programs. Someone once wanted to prove this. So he posted a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) about Amazon Kindle. He embedded a specific in his PDF file. Within a couple of months, there were several other WSOs with basically the same rehashed content as his. And guess what… WITH THE VERY SAME EMBEDDED ERROR! Some of them from very well respected users of the warrior forum.

The huge problem I see with Kindle is the arrival of the “IM (Internet Marketing) Crowd”. You know, the ones that want to make a fortune overnight with no effort or thought involved. We have seen the “magic bullet” for Kindle move from PLR, to Recipes, to outsourcing articles to be combined into non-fiction books. You even saw article spinners used to create “unique content” that tricked and got past the Kindle filters. It goes on and on.

Very few of the Kindle programs out there have anything do with the reality of publishing a Kindle product. Unfortunately you will find out, that telling the truth in a WSO doesn’t get you any sales either. If you don’t promote the quick and easy, bazillion dollars for no effort, you won´t see many sales. A WSO with a very long sales latter combined with rehashed crap seems to get the job done. The is the awful truth with WSOs and the stupid new-age Internet Marketing population of this world. Around 10% of all the WSOs and courses are good for something. The rest simply takes up you harddrive space. You know, some days it’s bullshit owning a functioning conscience.

Bottom line: I’ve got over a dozen titles, (mostly non-fiction published.) Each niche has it’s own pseudonym. Some make reasonable money. Some were a waste of time (not counting my personal education as to what I need to do better next time) and money. You win some, you lose some.

From my perspective, the truth about Kindle publishing and keys to Kindle success contradict the get quick rich fast concept most courses follow:

 

 

 

The Awful Truth About Kindle

• Do it yourself. Write your own eBooks. Kindle isn’t Internet Marketing. Kindle is the writer´s world. You can´t bundle a couple of cheaply written articles and call them a book or short journaly and expect to make a lot of money.

• Edit, wait a couple of weeks and then edit again. Outsourcing the editing process is a very good idea and highly recommended

• If you can’t spell, or don’t know what various words mean, you need to have someone who is an English major to review your book, before you publish it. Maybe get your hands on a book on Homophones.

• Make sure you handled the formatting correctly. You will be surprised by how many books are returned because they were almost unreadable, since the author didn’t pay close attention to formatting. If you publish your book and it doesn´t look legit, you need to republish it. If you don’t know how to format your eBook, either learn how to do it, or find someone to format for you. This is an often overlooked aspect that can make or break your book.

• If you don´t already own one, buy a Kindle as soon as possible. Some apps are great but they won´t show kindle books the same way a real Kindle device does. Kindles nowaday are reasonably cheap and very handy once you get used to them. I own a paperwhite and Kindle Fire HD and find that they are pretty consistent when it comes to how they display the Kindle books.

• Series’ are king. Fiction and non-fiction. A series of related titles (related niches or sub niches) in non-fiction will help boost sales. A series in fiction will build readership and give you the opportunity to branch into related genres.

• Build your brand (for each pseudonym). The only IM thing I really support or follow is building a list. Each of my pseudonyms has it’s own list, but I’m not obnoxious about trying to get people into the list. Most of my list members come from a link at the back of my books, not from outside efforts or squeeze pages.

• Pay attention to your reviews. If you get a bad one, figure out what the complaint was. Sometimes, it’s just unmet expectation. (Remember, Kindle isn’t IM, you can’t hype something to the moon and not deliver.) I’ve had more negative reviews from freebies than regular sales. Seems a freebie should give you the world, even if a paid version doesn’t. Anyway, RESPOND to the reviews. Don’t get into a flaming war with them, but re-edit the work and release a new version, then respond with an appropriate comment that a new version correcting the problem is available. As an example, I had one review that bitched about poor spelling. I re-edited, found _two_ words that were misspelled, an a couple more words that were apparently above the reading level of the complainer. Corrected two words, reworded three sentences to be more easily understood. Republished as a new version, responded to the bad review with “re-edited to fix all errors” and the complainer retracted his previous review and posted a 4 star in it’s place. Don’t buy reviews, they are nearly always 5 star and real people tend to ignore most of the gushing 5-star reviews. By far, they read the negative ones first. Strangely, one of my best selling non-fiction books has a single 3-star review that essentially says “not my cup of tea, but if you want to learn about xxxxx, you may find this interesting” while another with several 5-star reviews gets nearly no sales (under 5 a month).

• Nothing in Kindle is “fast” or “overnight.” As mentioned in previous posts, it can take time for a sale to appear as income. The rule I’ve observed is 15 days after the end of the second month since the sale… Thus, a sale any time in January gets paid around 15 March. If you’re focused in getting money fast, Kindle is NOT for you. Kindle is a long, slow build, but can be quite lucrative in the long term if you’re willing to put in the work. As someone in a former lifetime in high-tech put it “duty now, for the future.”

• You need to promote your titles. Don’t go overboard at first with web sites, social media and the lot. Get the series out there and available first. Then get up a basic wordpress site and ease into the social scene, and set up an autoresponder for an email list. Once these are up and ready, put links in your existing books (republish as an updated version) and any future titles from the same pseudonym.

• Don’t commit to a schedule unless you don’t do anything but write full time. If you’re planning to put out a short story a week, get a couple of months of titles published before you make a big deal about it. By then, you’ll know if your series has legs, and if you can keep up the pace. If so, great. Unfortunately, there are tons of “series” out there that have only one or two titles before they peter out. Same for books that were promoted as a trilogy, but only the first book ever gets published.

• writing is hard work, You can make a living at if you are halfway decent (and have a good editor). It’s not a quick win, but a long term commitment.

• Don’t believe half of what you read about what people make. Yes,
  
  there are some that make really good living on Kindle, but most authors
  
  aren’t. Yes, you can make enough money to quit your day job, but it’s going to take some time to ramp up to that sort of level.

 

I hope you enjoyed to read about the truth about Kindle.

Truth About Kindle and IM