travel up: Passive Income With Kindle Publishing

Kindle publishing has been a great way for affiliates to diversify their business. It?s not a magic bullet,? but it can provide consistent, stable income if done correctly. In the affplaybook.com forum we?ve been discussing how to approach Kindle publishing from a business perspective and not an affiliate perspective. There?s an important difference!

Publishing is one of those things that not many affiliates get right. That?s unfortunate because it has the potential to offer mostly passive income after the initial work is done. I wanted to give you some insights into getting started in this post.

What is Kindle Publishing?

Come on, really? Kindle publishing is nothing more than selling a book on the Amazon marketplace. In short ? you write a book, publish it on Amazon, and collect the commissions. Of course, it isn?t quite that easy but still close.

An Affiliate Walked Into a Bar..

?to write a Kindle book?ok, I?m obviously not going to earn much money writing comedy books, but think about how an average affiliate would approach Kindle publishing. They would probably do something with spun content, PLR, cheap overseas writers, etc. To make up for the lack of quality, they would just do hundreds and hundreds of books.

This approach won?t work well, if at all. First, Amazon is pretty strict about the PLR thing. Second, real people will actually review your books. Your books probably won?t get a ton of reviews (at least initially) so if people see a 1 star review you can expect sales to grind to a halt. It?s also safe to assume that Amazon will become stricter on publishers in the future.

Kindle publishing is not something to do unless you are willing to put in the work to make it viable long term. This means (to some of you) it?s going to be boring, you won?t see a lot of money for a while, and it will feel like you aren?t making progress. This is something you build over time that has the potential to last ?forever? with almost no upkeep or maintenance.

What?s the potential?

Will you become a millionaire publishing books on Amazon? Doubtful. Can you make a very steady, and relatively easy 4 and maybe even 5 figures per month? Absolutely! It will take months to get there though. This isn?t like an affiliate campaign where you can hit your first $100/day in a short matter of time.

What do I write about?

You can write about literally anything, but some stuff works better than others. A novel might take you a long time to write, where a basic ?how-to? book might go much faster.

This is key ? You?re not trying to write one magic book to make all your sales. Some of your books will sell well, others will flop. You want to be constantly writing and publishing books. No one single book will generate enough sales to make it worth having just that one. Another benefit of writing lots of books is cross promotional possibilities. You can actually have a significant effect on your books exposure through various promotional efforts in the Kindle marketplace.

Spend some time researching what people write. Download some books and see how they?re structured, how long they are, etc. Keep in mind, a lot of the self published books are crap so don?t necessarily copy their style.

But I hate writing!

This is probably not what you want to hear, but it?s the truth ? you can outsource your writing but it?s not going to work well. The problem is that most books won?t make a ton on their own, so what you would have to pay to have something (of the quality it needs to be) written will be more than the book would potentially make for years.

That doesn?t mean you have to do all the writing yourself. You might be able to partner with someone and each do half, you might have a relative who?s a good writer, etc.

There are tools to make writing faster too, like Dragon Naturally Speaking. Once you get into a good writing rhythm, it actually doesn?t take that long to crank something out.

Not all books need to be super long. Spend some time looking at Kindle books, and you?ll discover some formats that enable you to put a book together relatively fast.

There is so much potential, not just with selling the books themselves but promoting products inside the books and building email lists. All that is stuff for a possible future post! In the meantime, you can read more about Kindle publishing here https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help

If this sounds interesting to you, I would encourage you to start writing and publishing books asap. You?ll look back on this post in 6 months and be glad you did.