Brutally Honest Look at KDP Journey for Beginners
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- Опубликовано: 22 дек 2024
- KDP, or Kindle Direct Publishing, through Amazon is sometimes pushed as a get-rich-quick form of passive income. However, many find that creating an income with low content books is not as easy as you may have been led to believe. This video is an honest look at the beginning of my KDP journey to hopefully give you a more realistic overview.
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After 4 years on KDP... no, it's not easy and it's always changing/getting harder. Still, one of the best online business opportunites out there I think.
That’s great to hear!
Agreed. It's hard work though, not passive income :)
Glad to see that i am not alone. The ordeal had me convinced i was either born stupid ir getting senile (i am 80 yo). Again, thanks for the company. Will try and keep tabs on you...
I started my Amazon KDP journey properly around 18 months ago. I'm at 130+ books and in order to make money on Amazon it generally takes a large amount of high quality books in not overly saturated areas. Good luck, but I've got some brutally honest videos with transparent earnings as well :)
I agree with you 100%. Once you figure it out it’s easier to upload and get published. I write children’s books. I’m glad I stuck with it. Hang in there and thank you for your refreshing and funny honesty.
That’s awesome, and thank you!!
Forget about the honesty and all, I totally adore her energy !!!!!
I enjoyed your video, thank you for sharing your experience. I'm considering doing KDP for some medium content books and I hope that I will gather enough information to get me started. Your video was a good start.
That’s wonderful, Marilyn! I’m so glad it was helpful!
I appreciate your informational transparency. I look forward to scanning your channel and sharing. ❤
That’s great to hear!
Wait HOW did the subscribe button animate with a rainbow when you just said Subscribe??? Does YT do that now???
Oh, THAT’S cool! I’ve seen that happen on other people’s videos, but I didn’t know how they did it and didn’t know it happened on any of mine! Maybe RUclips does it somehow on videos with a certain amount of views or something?
Take a deep breath
Don’t give up
Learn and get better
Now get back in there!!!
Thanks!
Thanks for the video. You really have great resilience and hope to see it soon
Thank you!
Love your honesty!! I tried to use Smash Words and got stuck with formatting, that was in 2016. I've written a large body of work in the holisic health area (I went to school and have practical experience in a clinical setting for this topic) plus have more work written in other genres. At this point (especially after watching your wonderfully honest video) I'll look at hiring a tech guy for help. It seems that a lot of videos on YT are there for click bait to get views to make it sound easy. I wish you the best to figure it all out!
I wish you the best as well! Thank you for watching, and I’m so glad it was helpful!
How many books did you upload? Did you use Publisher Rocket?
I just uploaded the one.
This is exactly how I feel right now. I've been watching videos, taking notes, and learning. Today, I finally decided to start creating a journal, but it's not as easy as they say. They do everything so fast, and I probably need more experience with canva. I will keep working a little bit on it each day, but it is NOT that easy.
Best of luck to you on your journal! It’s definitely still fun to give it your best, so I’m glad to hear you’re still wanting to work on it!
I agree that it isn’t as easy as they make it sound. I fought with that cover issue for days. I finally used the cover creator to make a book cover. I am waiting on the proof copy now. Hopefully, it looks good. We will see soon.
Yes, that cover!! So frustrating. Wishing you great results for all that hard work!
I’m so glad you have been brutally honest about your experience. Which is the reason I subscribed. I have at least 15 guide books on various subjects that I have ready to be uploaded (still need to create the cover and internal images, may use designrr?) do you have any other suggestions as to other platforms to upload to?
P.S. I hope it all works out.
Thank you for subscribing! I can’t currently recall the other platforms to upload to, but I did see them listed in another RUclipsr’s video. So, they are definitely out there!
The size is on KDP then you take those to Canva to make a custom template. On the cover I use Ai then my words. I have anxiety I am not up for the other stuff. I sold some books I have no read. Just be sure you have other outlets. I love this.
When you heard the 30 mins was it for an ebook? that is exactly what is on most videos. My reviews all took less than 24 hours. I don't make printed books. There are some clicks you're not using on the top right. You might want to update this video.
Thank you for an honest video. I started on KDP last year and it has been tough. I have just over 60 books listed and they are a mix of low content and medium content books. I have made only 4 sales. Very disappointing but i keep going. One of my biggest obstacles is subscribing to some of these websites gurus use to make their creations from or to do their research. I can only afford 2 at the moment but am hoping to add another 1 or 2 by the end of the year. I think some of them forget it's financially difficult to subscribe to several of the more popular sites they use.
Oh my goodness, yes! It’s a tricky situation. It definitely can feel like the big players in the KDP world are disconnected from what it’s like for a lot of us. And I imagine they probably get a bit of a commission when someone purchases subscriptions to the services that they recommend. Thank you for being here, and hopefully you can find some encouragement along the way!
i wish you well - and yes there are so many promotions where it is made to look so easy.👏🏼👏🏼💯💯
Thank you so much!
Not to mention that the places that print your book do a terrible job and 50% of the books have crooked pages or not registered correctly. Which is out of our control even after the book is perfect.
I hadn’t heard about that-yikes!
I feel like you just had a rough start. I’m not tech savvy but my experience was fairly smooth and easy. Honestly it’s easier if you watch cover tutorials because they’ll explain the terms.
Well said. Gurus telling you things are easy find it so because they've invested in learning the stuff to become gurus. But learning things the first time is rarely easy for their devotees. And learning stuff you're only going to use once, or so rarely that you have to learn it anew every time...is not always worth the time.
(Incidentally I just had to learn where to write this comment using a web browser. Took a minute of my life. But easy. Really, really easy. So long as you've done it once and RUclips doesn't move the comments box before you have to do it again. Which, at some point they will. Any you'll have to learn it again.)
KDP Rocket is a wonderful example. Super cool if KDP keywords and categories are your full-time job. Saves a ton of labour I am sure. If you only get to reviewing that stuff once a year because you already have a full-time job? Then you invest labour in learning the labour-saving...and it'll be worthless the next time because Amazon will change the rules and/or you will have forgotten. That is the honest tale of labour-saving tech designed to help you tackle tech.
I cannot give you much advice as I am also starting with kdp. I am working through my first book, but have you tried the kdp cover calculator? Is at easy to put in the number of pages of your book and download the template. In the tamplate you have also the dimensions of the entire cover, back + front + side. Just create a new project in canva, personalised with the size you need. Copy and paste the template and from there you create your cover. It took me about 3 days to create my cover, but the download part was really easy.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use the kdp cover calculator, as our laptop computer is too old/outdated to download the file onto it properly. But I agree, it probably would have been much easier to use it!🙂
IF someone finds it is the key word!! I published my book on heart health 4-5 years ago and it’s buried in the search engine by books by more “scientific” writers. Everyone who has bought my book was sent there by me or a friend. 🤷🏻♀️ PS: I updated it and created a 2nd edition of same books and lost ALL my reviews of a nearly identical book 🤦🏻♀️
Oh, wow! Okay, good to know-thank you!!
Oh my WORD, what an ordeal!!! Thanks for the heads up about all this. People really do make KDP sound effortless! I wish you lots and lots of money in the very near future 😅
@@annelivingstonart Aww, thank you so much! Right back at you!
What marketing have you done? What SEO work have you done? Have you actually sold your book or have you just made it and uploaded it?
@@lewisbloom I gave more info in the next two videos. Feel free to check them out!
"Now, I don't feel so bad" !!! 😂...❤
Thanks for the video. Looks like you got a lot a time to spend for little results... and endless patience.
That was a very honest !
Thank you for sharing🎉
Thanks for watching!
Tune in to my live from today, there was honest venting going on... 😝
Mindset is everything.
That woman is positively adorable!
Amazon Kdp not easy at all. People out there make it sound super easy🙄
Totally! I was not prepared for how difficult it would be!
I can relate… let’s all do this together 💪🏼
Beside the point of the video. LOVE the tree art in the background!
Aw, thank you so much! A life-long friend of mine painted it for me and my husband as a wedding gift!
also, hire out for ads and learn from them as they do it for you
Thanks. You made me laugh. Png Pdf Jpg Kdp. A whole new language. I made five journals two years ago using Gimp and Scribus running on Linux. So being a techie helps. I loved the creativity of it. But nothing sold so I lost interest. Recently I watched a real life publisher who said, Amazon isn't a publisher. You are. Amazon checks your book, displays it, prints it when somebody wants to buy it, delivers it, and gives you a percentage. And that's a very small part of a publisher's life. The rest is huge, including things like editing, proofreading, cover design. But the biggest one of all is marketing. And perhaps the legal side like copyright. If you enjoy steep learning curves, become a self publisher. But beware. It gets in your blood. So I'm back in.
Oh, wow-back in! For me, I’m just going to do this one journal as an experiment. We’ll see how it goes!
Sounds like it’s Simple, not easy. Similar to the real estate industry and its investment strategies.😅
You are hilarious and smart 😂! ❤
Your vid is quite informative but your laughing is awkward.
😆
And your comment is rude and senseless.
FIVERR did you try FIVERR! I'm like you but I'm about to jump in. I hope 2 years down the road I can buy a good used car! Seriously!!! I'm so desperate now I believe I'm developing an ulcer. So many bad things happened to me over the last year that I can't think clearly, it's hard to get it together. I hope to pull it together enough to make some positive progress. Right now if I were denied publishing because of some asinine font I'd lose it. Maybe there's a reason I can't get it together now. God works in mysterious ways! Good luck to you!
Thank you-good luck to you too! I’ve tried Fiverr for other things and didn’t have too good of an experience, but I appreciate the suggestion!