Wow, Keith! Preach, brother! I do agree that we can be impactful, even if we don't realize it. If you're lucky enough to know some of your customers, they may surprise you with how much they enjoyed your book, or how they felt like that had to buy copies for family members. That's deep impact!
I’m glad you enjoyed the video. The impact we make is one of the main reasons I love doing in person visits. To be able to interact with my buyers is priceless!
I love this message! This is the most useful advice. When you start self publishing you there are many trials and errors. My personal experience when I decided to create products that matters to me not following the trends, I saw my books selling with the half effort. Why ? Because it was so easy for me to market them, to talk about them, I was and I am still proud of them. I believe that we have to create products that are really close to our hearts. I am wishing the best to all of us.
Thank you so much for the kind words. I truly agree. While you CAN create books that you don’t have a personal connection with, those tend to be harder to market and promote, because you don’t have that familiarity and interest.
After being in this for a year, I think the thing that the gurus don't tell you is you will probably spend thousands of dollars creating or getting others to make you a portfolio of products upfront and only about 3 to 5% will be consistent sellers. Furthermore, advertising will eat all or most of your profit. It is costing me 10 to 15 clicks for every one sale and at the end I don't own the customer. It seems to me that the only way to make this business profitable is if you are able to get a lot of organic sales. What am I missing?
Wow, there are so many great questions in here. Yes, it can be very easy to spend more than you make in this business, which is why I ALWAYS say, never budget on ads what you can't afford to lose. Especially since, even if your ad does amazingly well, you won't see the royalties from that for another 60 days, while Amazon Ads takes out their money much sooner than that. That said, while yes, organic sales is ideal and the best long-term strategy, for many books you may need to run ads or some other promotion types to get your book extra visibility. In the end, you really want to create an email list, that way you CAN make those that purchase your book, YOUR customers. You can reach out to them in the future, deepen your connection with them and turn that one purchase into hopefully many, many more. The key to making your ads more profitable is to find targets(keywords or products) that are extremely relevant to your book but that are less competitive. Less competitive means the CPC will be lower. I have a couple videos that go deeper into Amazon ads, as well as social media ads (FB ads, Pinterest ads, etc.) I hope this helped.
Hi Keith, do you have a tutorial on how to self-publish a children's hardcover picture book on Amazon? We previously self-published a hardcover book on Lulu and linked it to Amazon, but the price ended up being very expensive. I’m curious how others are able to publish hardcovers on Amazon at a more affordable price.
@@KeithWheelerBooks One of my clients is looking to publish her children's picture book in hardcover on KDP. The book has 75 pages, is in premium color, and has an 8.25x11 trim size. To earn a $1 royalty, the list price would need to be set at $21.09. Are there any strategies or options to publish this hardcover book on Amazon at a lower price while still earning at least $1 in royalties?
Wow that’s a big children’s book. The price is high due to the color interior. You can try to go with standard color and see how that helps with the price. But I would definitely recommend ordering a proof copy to make sure the illustrations are good quality before publishing. Also, if you selected expanded distribution, that can drastically affect your pricing. For the hard cover, I’d stick with just Amazon. All that said, people expect to pay more for a hard cover. I’d keep the premium color, not pick expanded distribution and set the price at a price that ends in $.95. (Ie. $21.95, $22.95, etc.)
Wow, Keith! Preach, brother! I do agree that we can be impactful, even if we don't realize it. If you're lucky enough to know some of your customers, they may surprise you with how much they enjoyed your book, or how they felt like that had to buy copies for family members. That's deep impact!
I’m glad you enjoyed the video. The impact we make is one of the main reasons I love doing in person visits. To be able to interact with my buyers is priceless!
I love this message! This is the most useful advice. When you start self publishing you there are many trials and errors. My personal experience when I decided to create products that matters to me not following the trends, I saw my books selling with the half effort. Why ? Because it was so easy for me to market them, to talk about them, I was and I am still proud of them. I believe that we have to create products that are really close to our hearts. I am wishing the best to all of us.
Thank you so much for the kind words. I truly agree. While you CAN create books that you don’t have a personal connection with, those tend to be harder to market and promote, because you don’t have that familiarity and interest.
Very wise and inspiring words! ❤🙏🙏
Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Well said Keith!
Thank you so much. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Keith you're videos help me to keep going and publishing my stories. I love creating new stories.
I’m so glad you’re finding my videos helpful.
Very well said!
Thanks Nuria!
Thanks for the honest and encouraging reminder!
You're quite welcome! My goal is to always be honest and transparent, even if it's hard to hear, sometimes.
Thanks, Keith, appreciate your input as always…😎
Thank you so much for the kind words!
Very heartfelt. Thanks for the encouragement.
You're quite welcome! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.
This video popped just when I needed it. Thank you for this powerful advice. This video hit right on the mark. So you just impacted my life
I'm so glad to hear that! It's funny/ironic how we always tend to find something...right when we need it most!
I'm so thrilled you enjoyed!
What a valuable message, and one that I will try to keep at the forefront of my mind going forward. Thank you 😊
I’m so glad you enjoyed it! I wish you the best of luck in your business!
I needed to hear this message - Thank you.
I'm so glad it resonated with you. It's very easy in this business to forget the REAL reason why most of us started creating books.
After being in this for a year, I think the thing that the gurus don't tell you is you will probably spend thousands of dollars creating or getting others to make you a portfolio of products upfront and only about 3 to 5% will be consistent sellers. Furthermore, advertising will eat all or most of your profit. It is costing me 10 to 15 clicks for every one sale and at the end I don't own the customer. It seems to me that the only way to make this business profitable is if you are able to get a lot of organic sales. What am I missing?
Wow, there are so many great questions in here. Yes, it can be very easy to spend more than you make in this business, which is why I ALWAYS say, never budget on ads what you can't afford to lose. Especially since, even if your ad does amazingly well, you won't see the royalties from that for another 60 days, while Amazon Ads takes out their money much sooner than that.
That said, while yes, organic sales is ideal and the best long-term strategy, for many books you may need to run ads or some other promotion types to get your book extra visibility.
In the end, you really want to create an email list, that way you CAN make those that purchase your book, YOUR customers. You can reach out to them in the future, deepen your connection with them and turn that one purchase into hopefully many, many more.
The key to making your ads more profitable is to find targets(keywords or products) that are extremely relevant to your book but that are less competitive. Less competitive means the CPC will be lower.
I have a couple videos that go deeper into Amazon ads, as well as social media ads (FB ads, Pinterest ads, etc.)
I hope this helped.
Hi Keith, do you have a tutorial on how to self-publish a children's hardcover picture book on Amazon? We previously self-published a hardcover book on Lulu and linked it to Amazon, but the price ended up being very expensive. I’m curious how others are able to publish hardcovers on Amazon at a more affordable price.
I have a video on the quality of KDP hardcovers. I also have videos on the upload process for KDP (hardcover is the same setup as paperback).
@@KeithWheelerBooks thanks 😊
@@KeithWheelerBooks One of my clients is looking to publish her children's picture book in hardcover on KDP. The book has 75 pages, is in premium color, and has an 8.25x11 trim size. To earn a $1 royalty, the list price would need to be set at $21.09. Are there any strategies or options to publish this hardcover book on Amazon at a lower price while still earning at least $1 in royalties?
No problem.
Wow that’s a big children’s book. The price is high due to the color interior. You can try to go with standard color and see how that helps with the price. But I would definitely recommend ordering a proof copy to make sure the illustrations are good quality before publishing.
Also, if you selected expanded distribution, that can drastically affect your pricing. For the hard cover, I’d stick with just Amazon.
All that said, people expect to pay more for a hard cover. I’d keep the premium color, not pick expanded distribution and set the price at a price that ends in $.95. (Ie. $21.95, $22.95, etc.)