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When Dave Chesson was in the US Navy, he would spend lots of time away from his family. And he hated it.
He decided to create a portfolio of niche sites in an attempt to earn enough to quit his job, but his path took a different turn.
He got the idea to turn one of his websites into a book and self-publish it. As it turned out, it was the start of something big, and it allowed him to eventually quit his job to be with his wife and kids.
Today, he’s the author of 10 books which have earned him +$750k to date, and he also created a tool and a website to help others publish their books using the Kindle Publishing Platform.
In this interview, he shares the details of his journey as well as lots of tips for getting started with—and succeeding—with self-publishing.
Watch the Full Episode
Dave starts by sharing a little bit about his backstory and about how he got into building niche sites while in the military but wasn’t earning enough from them to quit his job.
He came up with the idea of turning one of his websites into a book using the then-newly released Kindle Publishing platform. This significantly increased his earnings, and he was able to funnel people to his books through his websites.
But what Dave really wanted to do was rank higher on Amazon so more people would see and buy his books, so he started to study Amazon’s metadata. Essentially, he dove headfirst into Amazon SEO.
This kickstarted his self-publishing career: he would build a niche website, pair it with a book, and also publish books on their own.
This led him to create Kindlepreneur, where he teaches people how to write, self-publish, and market their own books.
He talks about how to know if your website content is worth turning into a book and what to do if you have content but not a website, and then he shares exactly how to turn your website articles into an ebook.
When Jared asks about using dry SEO content, Dave offers a series of tips for making the book more interesting. He also talks about reverse engineering ideas for niche websites and books by mining Amazon.
Moving on, Dave talks about getting your book to rank higher on Amazon’s listings using KDP boxes, connecting with shoppers, writing book descriptions, understanding the way the Amazon algorithm works, and focusing on the importance of keyword research.
Dave created a tool to make publishing on Amazon easier called Publisher Rocket, and he explains how he created it and how it works.
He talks about the importance of your book cover and the “Amazon Honeymoon Period,” as well as marketing your book with ads.
Dave also discusses book reviews and the role they play in Amazon rankings.
He also talks about the difference between writing fiction vs. non-fiction, what it costs on average to put a book together, formatting software, and how much you can potentially earn.
There are also benefits to publishing multiple books, which he discusses, as well as the shelf-life of a book and how sales maintenance works.
He concludes by sharing some of his wins: the 10 books he’s published have brought in +$750k and they earn him between $7k and $14k per month.
Finally, he also talks about why he created Kindlepreneur and what he aims to achieve with that website.
Links & Resources
Topics Dave Chesson Talks About
- Turning his website content into books
- Discovering Amazon SEO
- Creating Kindlepreneur
- How to know if your content has book potential
- How to turn your content into an ebook
- Reusing SEO content
- Amazon SEO
- Amazon keyword research
- Publisher Rocket
- Book covers
- Marketing your book
- Sales revenue
- Why publish multiple books
- Book sales
- Dave’s stats
Transcript
Jared: Today we’re joined by Dave Chesson with Kindlepreneur.
Dave: I’ve been in the publishing and self publishing world for years. I’ve been a consultant to major publishing companies. As well as worked with and coached many well known award winning authors.
Jared: We’re talking about publishing specifically around Kindle and stuff.
Dave: I said, what if I took the entire website that I made and I just turned it into a book?
Jared: Talk about how to get your book high up in Amazon.
Dave: Is it’s not about a question. It’s not about a statement. It’s not about a sentence. It’s about
Jared: What do you do if you follow all these steps? And the book is not getting the kind of traction that you want it to get.
Dave: Now that is extra icing on the cake. So anybody listening here, you want to take your writing skills to the next level. Just take that content, alright? And literally you can
Jared: What type of success have you had?
Dave: I’ve since done 10 books. Those have collectively brought over 750, 000. Every month, consistently 7, 000 to 14, 000, depending on the season.
Jared: What is the process That you’d recommend someone does in order to make an ebook out of content they’ve pretty much already published on their website.
Dave: Yeah. Uh, that’s a great, um, a great question. And quite frankly, doing that’s never been easier. Um, I would say first.
Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast.
My name is Jared Bauman and today we’re joined by Dave Chesson with Kindlepreneur. Dave, welcome on board. Hey, thanks for having me. It’s good to be here. It’s funny. I reached out to you about coming on. Cause I love some of the things you’re doing. I think the topic is really interesting for audience.
Turns out, you know, Spencer, you know, niche pursuits, and it was not quite a cold reach out like I thought it might be. So welcome onto the podcast.
Dave: Yeah, well, honestly, I’ve been a follower of Spencer for a very long time and I could attribute a lot of the success that I’ve seen, uh, just by learning from Spencer and each pursuit.
So it’s really cool to go from someone who was like in the beginning trying to figure these things out, online marketing and following through on everything that was talked about and now I’m getting to be a guest. So that’s, that’s always cool. The
Jared: full circle is always fun when we have somebody who maybe got some inspiration from something on the podcast.
Went out and just totally killed it with what they’re doing right now. Why don’t you, um, I mean, bring us up to speed on your backstory. We’re talking about publishing, uh, specifically around Kindle and stuff today. I think this is going to be really interesting for people in terms of eBooks. Amazon and another platform to use our content skills.
But you have a fun backstory in terms of how you got involved in this. Um, maybe catch us up to that.
Dave: Yeah. So, I mean, a long time ago, um, I really got into niche marketing, um, you know, and do an SEO, uh, I would build these niche websites and I get ranking at Google and I drive some traffic and at the time my goal, I was in the military.
I was stationed on the other side of the world in Korea. And my goal was to one day make 10, 000 a month, you know, on regular so that I could get out of the military and be home with my family. And so when I started learning about SEO and niche marketing, um, I was like, wow, okay, cool. I’m actually making money online.
That’s neat. But when I started looking at it, I was making like a hundred, 200, maybe a month, you know, per website. I was like, Oh boy. Okay. I got two decisions here. Either A, I massively create a whole bunch of websites or B, I need to find another monetization effort. And so here I had a couple of really, you know, decent, but small, like a couple thousand a month visitors, you know, so nothing crazy and I said, you know, I built this entire niche website talking about teaching people on, you know, how to learn a language or, you know, these other things I said, what if I took the entire, uh, website that I made and I just turned it into a book because there was this thing called Kindle Direct Publishing, where you could literally for the first time ever again, back in the day, in the first time ever.
You had the power to publish your own book. You didn’t have to go through the gatekeepers of publishing companies, you know, on highbrow, you know, nose up in the air editors. Um, you could just put it out there. So I did this and all of a sudden I was like, wow, my, my websites were, instead of making like 200 a month, they were making 2, 000 a month.
Because people were coming to the website, they’re reading about the book. They wanted the easy button. So instead of reading all the stuff on my website, they could just click here. You know, and for 2. 99 for the e book or 10 for the print book, they could get everything in one spot. Now all of a sudden I started funneling more people to light books and my niche websites were making more money.
I was like, this is cool. Now that’s easier. Maybe if I make 10 of these sites, I could be making 20, 000. But then I started looking at Amazon and just with kind of an SEO mind, I was like, wait a second. Why is it that Amazon showing this book above mine? What can I do to convince the Amazon search algorithm, um, you know, to actually put my book in front of shoppers, put it in the number one, you know, search engine results page, right?
The cert, uh, what’s funny is this was so long ago, uh, when I first started asking this question, I was actually writing for SCR, uh, Semrush. Um, you know, the tool. And, um, I wrote an article on Amazon SEO and I’ll be the, I’m going to honestly say I was not the first person to write Amazon SEO, but because it was on SEMrush and it was a really big article, sometimes people credit me as, as saying, I’m going to clear the, clear the air, but I started analyzing Amazon like a search engine and I started looking at the metadata and the things you could change.
And from that, I was able to learn how to position my books better and to get better rankings and all of a sudden Amazon was sending, so it wasn’t just my niche website that was sending people to the book, it was also, Amazon was sending new people to the book. And so all of a sudden my books started increasing in sales.
And then I was like, I was off to the races. You know, I was, I was building a niche website. I was pairing it with a book. And then I was also publishing books on their own. Um, and so that really kicked started my whole self publishing career. And because of that, I created kindleprinter. com, my main website, uh, teaching people how to not only write and self publish their books, but also how to market their books.
Um, and that’s grown like crazy and that’s been a lot of fun. And since then, I’ve been a. A consultant to New York times, bestselling authors, both fiction and nonfiction. I’ve, um, been a consultant to major publishing companies across the board. Um, and it’s just been a wild ride.
Jared: It’s such a fascinating journey that you go through because so many people listening are probably at some point have thought about, wow, I write content. I create content in many ways for a living, whether it’s for a website I make, or whether it’s for a social media account I run, or an email newsletter, or in some way, shape or form, I’m a content creator.
Why am I not creating a book out of it? And I think, you know, What would help people understand if they are a good fit for publishing a book on an Amazon type platform? Maybe, I know it’s a very broad level question, but maybe just to get us into this concept.
Dave: Yeah, well, if you have a platform, like you’ve built a niche website or something like that, where you have people coming there hungry to read your information, you’ve already got a really good indicator, okay, of whether or not, um, you should write a book.
But if you want even more proof, what you can do is you can start to find a book that’s sort of about the same information as your website, and you can use Amazon associate and put links there and start to track to see how many people are literally clicking your link and find that book on Amazon. Now you can use that data.
So if your website is say automatically selling, you know, 10 or 20 copies of a book, now, you know, that not only can you drive 10 or 20 sales a month, automatically. But what’s going to be really cool is Amazon sees your book and its popularity, and it’s going to show your book more often as well. So it’s going to be this kind of exponential growth.
And I think that’s a wonderful indicator. Now let’s say you don’t have a niche website where you don’t have a website or following or podcast. You know, you’re building content, but you just don’t seem to have that group. I would say that you could also go to Amazon and look at it as a traffic generator.
Um, so for example, a buddy of mine has a podcast called blurry creatures. Um, it’s, it’s a really cool group. Um, you know, their, their thing is like, you know, the Nephilim and, and Bigfoot. And, um, they also look into parts of the, I’m not pushing religion here, but just for content. They look into parts of the Bible that aren’t discussed.
Um, and so for them, um, what they did was they took a public domain. Now a public domain is a book that doesn’t have a copyright anymore. So in this case, they took the book of Enoch and they republished it. They made some changes, but what’s been amazing for them. Is that not only are people searching for that book, the book of Enoch, um, but that every time people buy it from Amazon, they’re learning about their podcasts and now going to their content, which I think is a really cool thing.
So it’s not just sending people to make the sales. It’s also another way to send people from Amazon to your content and help to build your brand, build your email list, build your following. Uh, as well as making sales, which is nice.
Jared: I wrote down public domain because I had that as a question for you on my agenda anyways, and I kind of double starred it so we can circle back on it and brought it up.
Let’s talk about the person who’s got a website and they have a bunch of content already published. So, um, a typical scenario in the blogging world would be that you blog about a variety of topics all around your core. Theme of your site, whether that’s, um, you know, to your point, uh, you know, blurry creatures, whether it’s, you know, basket wheezing, whether it’s motor sports, you know, whatever it is, your, your topic is, what is the process that you’d recommend someone does in order to make an ebook out of content they’ve pretty much already published on their website?
Dave: Yeah, uh, that’s a great, um, a great question. And quite frankly, doing that’s never been easier. Um, I would say first, think about building a table of contents. Okay, so if you were going to write a book about this whatever subject, okay? Um, how would you want to structure the chapter titles? Now you probably already have an article that basically is equivalent of that title, or that chapter title, right?
So just take that content, alright, and literally you can kind of put the link to it. Now, there’s a lot of new AI, um, software out there that what it can do is you can tell it, Hey, go ahead and read this article and rewrite it like it’s a chapter. And you can start to actually quickly formulate a book using your content and structuring it in the book.
Maybe it’s rewritten in that respect. I would then go through and, and read, you know, read through and make sure it connects from point to point. Uh, when it comes to nonfiction, I, I call it a chapter sandwich. Um, I really love this process. And what I mean by chapter sandwich is that, you know, the first part of a chapter in a nonfiction, you’re giving them a heads up.
Hey, you know, in this, in this chapter, we’re going to be covering these things. This is really important. Then you give them the real meat of it in the middle. Okay. You’re giving them that detail and then you’re ending the chapter with, okay. So in this, you know, we learned about this and here’s in the next chapter, we’re going to do this.
And when you do that kind of sandwich, it makes it into a really easy process. A little bit of a cookie cutter to help to formulate your book. Um, so you can either do that by hand. You have that in your, you know, you’ve already written the stuff, you know what you’re doing. So you can either just sit down and write it, or you can also use AI to regenerate the stuff that you’ve already made, start to put together and package that.
Jared: I’m glad you brought that up because a lot of people, I’m just thinking of myself, for example, like a lot of us have written content for our website with an SEO mindset, which unfortunately, if I’m just being generalistic, is devoid of personality. Yeah, is awesome, right? Like introductions are sparse and brief and not very explanatory.
Conclusions are non existent. Storytelling is not a thing. supported in any way, like, right. SEO has kind of made a lot of content fairly, uh, cut and dry. How important is it that you take your, let’s just call it cut and dry SEO content and spice it up. How do you add introductions conclusions? Is, is there a role for AI in this, or do we kind of have to just put on our kind of emotive hat to do this?
Dave: So if you’re just trying to get informational, uh, say booklets or so, you know, if people are truly want to learn this one thing, um, and let’s say there’s not a lot of competition on that one thing, then I would not really go into too much into trying to weave stories and craft something. Absolutely. Just present the information in a methodical, well thought out, laid out thing, and you’re going to do great.
Now that being said, though, is, is that I actually have my own little formula that I love using when I’m writing, especially in nonfiction. And what it is, is that I always actually try to find stories, either in history, Or in my own personal life to help exemplify the point I’m making in that chapter. Uh, a long time ago I, I used to use Evernote, you know, and Evernote, it’s funny as I still have a giant collection of all these crazy stories that I’ve come across.
Like some of the weirdest stuff in history. Matter of fact, there’s a great Facebook group or so that’s called Weird Facts of History. And so every time I find something just crazy. Crazy radical. I will put it into my Trello board. I’ll put in my, um, into my Evernote. Um, and that way, when it comes time for me to write a chapter, I love to weave in some crazy cool story that helps to push the point across now that is extra icing on the cake.
So anybody listening here, you want to take your writing skills to the next level. I love that you brought up the fact that as we write for SEO, we’re, we’re writing it for just an algorithm. And generally we usually, uh, benefit from that a little bit, but when it comes to the book, I do think it’s really great to weave in, you know, truth and humanism and know that the Amazon algorithm is not reading your book.
So, you know, that doesn’t matter as much as Google does, um, in terms of reading your content. So instead really, you know, give it a humanistic element, make it fun, make it a entertaining. I’ve always said that, you know. What is it? John C. Maxwell’s, was it 27 irrefutable laws of leadership? I always get the number wrong.
Dave: The funny thing about it is, those laws of leadership, they work. It wasn’t as if the laws of leadership were so revolutionary by themselves. We all know. However, though, the stories that he told helped to stick in our minds and made them incredibly entertaining. And I think that that’s one way that we can make a better nonfiction book, if we so choose.
Jared: Okay, okay, very good. Let’s get on to a topic that I think a lot of people, you probably picked their interest, which is when you said Amazon SEO. So, I feel as if you’re going to have a lot of experience at, we talked about writing content that does well in search. Talk about how to get your book high up in Amazon’s, uh, listing so you can sell more.
Dave: Yeah, well, you know, uh, Amazon’s really good about this. So when you go to publish your book on Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP, um, you’re going to enter in your title and subtitle. And you’re going to enter in, you know, key metadata of your book. Okay. This play an important part, but one of the biggest parts is that there’s an area called the seven Kindle keyword boxes.
Okay. These are seven boxes where you can put in words that help to describe your book. This is literally like old school. Yeah. SEO, where you had the meta tags, right? You would say, okay, here are my seven keywords. You know, that I, I think nowadays we all know that Google doesn’t use that information anymore whatsoever.
I No, if you put it in there, you have to hard code it because nobody cares, but in Amazon, that is not the case. You get an opportunity to start using phrases and those phrases are really important to Amazon because this is your opportunity to describe, Hey, if people are searching for this, this is what my book is, this is what my book is about.
And so Amazon’s taking that information and they’re using it to figure out where you should show up in their search engine. And under what, uh, phrases and what kind of tertiary phrases and things like that. Now, these seven, uh, KDP boxes are really cool. There’s an article I wrote. We probably don’t have time to go into specific detail, but it’s called the seven KDP boxes, um, and it really talks about how you best approach that.
And just to give you a quick overview, each box allows you 50 characters. Okay. So that’s a letter, a space, uh, exclamation, whatever it be, right? The best thing that you can do is I recommend people that if you have identified two or three search terms that you really, really love, then put those two or three in their own box.
However, for the rest of them, it’s really important that you put as many words as you can fit in. And again, words or phrases that help the overall statement. Okay. Um, and in that article, I explain all of that, but just for detail, that’s a really important step. So you have your seven KDP boxes. The next thing, too, is your title and subtitle.
Uh, the title is something I recommend people be very creative about, you know, come up with something that, that it’s important for the shopper to read your title and then kind of understand what your book is about. But do not neglect your subtitle. Your subtitle is an excellent opportunity to use the words your shoppers would use when looking for a book, aka keywords.
Okay. Um, nothing better. Like, for example, if I’m shopping for a book on. Uh, you know, resolving back pain, okay, and you’ve written a book that says, you know, resolving back pain, uh, you know, in less than no time, you know, eradicate look lower back pain, or better yet sharp lower back. Now imagine that I’m typing into Amazon, you know, um, relief, lower sharp back pain.
And then I see a book that literally is, has that in the subtitle. I’m more than likely going to click on it and engage. I’m probably going to buy it because that’s the book for me, right? And so it’s not just about putting in keyword phrases that help to get the A9 Amazon algorithm, that’s its name, A9, to put you up there.
It’s about not only getting up there, but then connecting with the shopper themselves. So you’ve got your seven K2B boxes. You have your title and your subtitle. And the last thing is the book description. Now, there are some out there that do not think that Amazon, uh, uses the words in your book description.
And I’m here to tell everyone that that is 100 percent incorrect. Um, because the reason why some people think that Amazon doesn’t use the words in your book description is because they will take a sentence from a book description, put it in Amazon search, and hit search. And Amazon will come back and be like, uh, we can’t find this.
Mmm. Or They’ll make up some gobbledygook, like x, y, 6, you know, some little code. They’ll put it in their book description. And then they’ll search for it on Amazon, and Amazon will come back and say, But here’s the thing about book descriptions, as well as the way the algorithm works. Amazon knows people do not type in sentences.
When we go into Amazon and I type in, you know, I type in blue button up shirt, you know, collar, like, I’m not saying, Hi Amazon, I would like to find a long sleeve shirt that has ruffles and blah, blah, blah. We don’t type that way. Amazon search engine doesn’t look that way either. Instead it’s looking for particular words or phrases that match your kind of book.
So if I’ve written, say, a sci fi military book, it’s going to be scanning my book description for phrases like intergalactic battle, you know, starships, you know, battle cruisers, earth bombardment. All these words and phrases they know are part of this kind of product. See, that’s the big shift in mind, is it’s not about a question.
It’s not about a statement. It’s not about a sentence. It’s about productized words and phrases that helps the algorithm say, Okay, yes, this product goes here and that product goes there. And so when you are writing your book description, it’s a wonderful opportunity, especially in nonfiction, to use the pain points, the description of the resolution, you know, the agitators, all of these kind of words.
That helped not only the reader say, Oh man, this is the exact book I’m looking for, but also the algorithm to say, Oh, this is the exact product for that kind of person. And so when you weave these things in, you are setting up Amazon as an algorithm to say, Ah, I know exactly what this book is about. I know exactly where it goes, and therefore I know exactly who to show it to.
And when you do that, the algorithm loves you, they show you over the other books, and you get in front of their shoppers over others.
Jared: Sounds a lot like the best of both worlds of SEO, the old school era where we could just put in keywords, literally like almost keyword stuff in a way, but then also this semantically.
Relevant aspect of fully covering a topic and making sure that you use all the related terms, phrases, uh, to your point. So it sounds like you get to do the best of. Of both worlds in some ways. Um, where do you do keyword research on Amazon? I say that, maybe you don’t. But in SEO, we would do keyword research when we are looking for a topic to cover, but also looking for a specific article to write.
So, what role does keyword research play in, if at all?
Dave: Oh, an incredible part of it. Um, I probably should have started the whole Amazon SEO by saying, look, you have to do your keyword research. It’s just like in Google. Um, you know, some of the best ways to handle writing a book is you start with the keyword research.
Start looking for what shoppers on Amazon are looking for. And where there’s an opportunity. That’s a great way to validate your book idea and to know whether or not Amazon’s going to help to sell your book, or if it won’t. A second office is that then by doing your keyword research, you’re going to know how to better title your book, how to angle it, and also some of the things you should fill in.
For example, we were doing keyword research once, um, for a book and it’s, uh, I don’t have permission to use the, um, the author on this particular case, but if you search the book based off of the title of this, you’ll figure out which one it is, it did really well. Um, this person wrote a book on how to sell art.
And interesting enough, when doing keyword research on Amazon, Amazon’s keyword research, we found that actually more people were typing into Amazon, how to sell art online than just how to sell art. And all of a sudden this author had an epiphany. She was like, Oh my goodness. I’ve had so many people in the comments or in the reviews get mad because I don’t really cover the online component.
I’m like, yeah. Because Amazon shoppers were typing in how to sell art online. They were finding your book, buying it, and you weren’t serving what they wanted. And so, immediately, uh, they actually went through and they changed a whole giant section at the back end of the book to take care of those that were looking online.
And now, you know, the book has just done incredibly well over the past years, uh, over and over just because of that one little tweak. So I tell every author, um, regardless, most people say, okay, they get to publishing their book and then they want to get their seven boxes, right? So they do their keywords.
I love to start with my keyword research before I start writing, just like we do in Google. Um, you know, it’s good to have that, that list of articles to write based off of knowing, Hey, these are the things people are searching for and they know I can rank for that. So. I definitely recommend that if you’re looking for tools, um, Publisher Rocket is designed specifically for books on Amazon.
That’s books, eBooks, audio books, all of it. Um, not only does Publisher Rocket tell you what people are searching for on Amazon, it also tells you how hard the competition would be. It tells you how much money people are making that show up for that keyword phrase, and it allows you to kind of dig and see what’s working for them.
And just to be clear, because I didn’t say it right at the beginning, that’s actually a software I built because back in the day, there was no way for me to do this. I had crazy Excel sheets. I had, um, you know, calculations. I was doing all these things to try to figure it out. We’ve got a amazing programming team.
We’re able to create something that’s truly saying what’s happening inside of Amazon and helping people, uh, kind of figure out those keyword phrases. Um, and that honestly, it’s just been. A lifesaver. It’s been incredible. So
Jared: embr of, uh, having to on KDP to some degree actually, honestly, it’s the long tail
Dave: pro, uh, ah, of Amazon.
KDP well played Well, no, because what’s funny is, is that, um, you know, when Spencer built Long Tail Pro, again, remember I was, I’m a student way back in the day. I bought it on day one. And I loved how he had that competition score, right? I feel like he could be the first to say there was a legit competition score.
Maybe somebody else had it, but in my mind, he’s always been the first with that competition score. Now we get the KD score, A refs, you know, and Sam Rush score. But that was the first time somebody created that 1 to 100, you know? And I loved it, and I’m not gonna lie. We had to work hard to figure out how to do a competition score on Rocket.
So, I I’ve always told Spencer this to him and I’ll say it right here too is I, I saw that idea and I was like, Oh, that’s amazing. We need to put that in. And so you’ll see a little bit of long tailism in there.
Jared: Long tail pro for the win. I agree. Um, okay. So we’ve got this idea of Amazon SEO. We’ve got keyword research, the seven boxes, title, subtitle, description, any other things from a high level that people need to know about.
Kind of SEO in their book, whether it’s at the outset when they’re creating a book, you know, in terms of what to write, what to include, but also in terms of what to rank. And I do want to get into things like reviews and those sorts of topics. But in terms of just broad SEO for, for your book, any, anything we’ve missed or any big topics you want to make sure we hit on.
Dave: Now, the last big thing, and this is really important. Now we see this in Google SEO as well, but it’s convincing people to click on your book. I mean, Google’s monitoring. If they rank you number one and everybody’s skipping your article and go into the second article, you’re not going to be number one, no matter how much, you know, backlinks and all that, you know, magic you do.
Well, same thing with products. Cause here’s the thing. Amazon’s in the money in the business to make money. And they have a much better indicator of whether or not, you know, you should be number one or number two. Because when they put you number one, if nobody’s interacting with you and they’re not making money, they know, hey, when we put this other book, we made more money.
So, what I say about that is, it’s really about your cover. Your book cover plays such an important role on your sales. Because for what it’s worth, I can look at a book cover and I can be like, wow, that looks terrible. That’s not professional. I don’t want that. I’m going to go find a book cover that actually looks a lot better.
It looks professional, looks good. So what I do tell people is, hey, If you’re doing this, if you have some great, you know, Photoshop skills, awesome, then do that, but do not skimp on the cover, no matter what your keywords are, no matter how good your writing is, if your cover looks unprofessional, shoppers just skip it, and Amazon’s gonna notice.
That nobody’s purchasing your book, that nobody’s interacting with your book. And they’re going to decide to try somebody else instead of you at the top of that search engine. So covers are really important.
Jared: I could quote so many, um, uh, phrases and, you know, turns of phrase about, you don’t judge a book by its cover, but we’ll leave it there.
Supplies those days. He definitely judges a book by its cover. It’s a little about the greenback. There you go. Fair play. Um, Hey, let’s move into things like, How important are reviews? How much time and effort do we need to put into that? Marketing your book. Let’s say you’re not getting much traffic any longer to your website.
Maybe the helpful content update has hurt that. Or you’re just starting your website off. Or you skipped the website process. And so you aren’t driving much traffic to your book. What are the important factors once you’ve launched it, once you’ve done the SEO for it? What are the important things to continue to get, uh, it in front of Amazon and readers?
Dave: Well, if you don’t have any ways, let’s say you’re not apprised in, in book marketing and all the book marketing out there, and there’s a lot, by the way, I mean, there’s a whole website devoted to it, right? Uh, teaching all the different book marketing tech, but if you don’t have that traffic, you don’t have the, the website or the email list or anything like that.
I think that’s going to play a really important part in your keyword research, right? We talked about competition. Let’s Hey, don’t go after a 90, you know, or above competition score for a keyword phrase, if you don’t have those kind of tools, start looking at 10, because then you have an opportunity. To get in front of Amazon shoppers without those.
And then Amazon has, you know, is basically doing a lot of the work for you. Okay. So that’s the first thing to the question. But the second thing though, is that when you go to launch your book, uh, a good way to look at it is Amazon’s, Amazon’s watching. Okay. It’s like big brother, you know, it’s like 1984 over here.
They’re, they’re monitoring everything. They’re looking to see, okay, This person just came out with a book. We’re going to give them the benefit of the doubt. We’re going to show him or her, you know, in, in these search results. I mean, we actually call this the Amazon honeymoon period because they just, you know, it’s, it’s glorious.
Everything’s great. You can’t do anything wrong. They’ll put you everywhere, but then they’re watching and they want to see how well your book does. This is where most authors, when they launch a book, they try to schedule two, three, four weeks of like marketing efforts, ways to kind of pump in and send people, you know, to the book.
Uh, this could be going to like free book promotion sites and contacting them and getting them to email out to people. That’s one way where you can start spreading those out. Um, I’ve got an entire list of like 130 book promotion sites you can go to, um, to start engaging with. Another thing too, is if you do have an email list, start, you know, breaking your email list into cohorts and sending it out over time.
Um, if you have any marketing, you know, opportunities, if you’re on podcasts, if you are a podcast, you know, talking about it on your blog. And, um, and finally too, one of the best ways for people to really kind of push it is Amazon ads. Uh, Amazon ad system is phenomenal. Uh, what’s beautiful about Amazon ads is that unlike other social media People are on Amazon because they want to buy something.
So people have gone to Amazon because they’re ready to buy a book. They’re just looking for which book, your ad gets right in front of them. Whereas in like social media ads, you have to find somebody who’s already on Facebook, you know, and try to convince them to stop looking at those cute cat pictures and decide to buy a book and then decide to buy your book, right?
So it’s a really nice system. And for anybody who wants to learn Amazon ads, I have an absolutely free video course system. It, and by the way, it’s a hundred percent free. It’s really professionally done. There is no like higher level. I don’t sell another course. It’s everything I’ve got in Amazon ads. And you can find that at amscourse.
com. So you can learn that, start implementing some advertising, driving people to your book. And the good thing about Amazon ads is you only pay if somebody clicks on your book. So you set it up and if nobody’s clicking on it, you’re not paying anything. However, though, when people are clicking, it’s because somebody saw your book, cover your title, your subtitle, and they’re like, Oh, that looks interesting.
And they click to look into it and decide if they want to buy. So that’s a great way. Now let’s talk a little bit about reviews, right? You, I love the fact that you brought that up. Reviews play a little bit in the SEO. It’s true. Uh, not as much as people think. Yeah, because it’s got a big kind of aura about it, I’ll say from an outsider looking in.
It does, and I think really the way that if I were to, based off of all the knowledge I have working inside of Publisher Rocket, looking under the hood of Amazon and working with some of their programmers, If I were to say like a pie chart, right? And a hundred percent, you know, is all Amazon SEO. How would give like reviews about maybe a five or 10 percent effect on your SEO?
Because what it is there to do is to make sure that the customer is happy with what they bought. Okay? So if your book sucks and it got a whole bunch of one stars, Amazon wants long term customers. They don’t want to constantly send people to a book that people hate. Because then if Amazon’s constantly selling bad stuff to people, They’re going to be Teemu, you know, not amazon.
com, right? They’re going to be, you know, um, Wish and all these, and they don’t want that. They want happy customers. So they are taking that into account. But just because you have more reviews than somebody else, that other person might still be beating you because all the other factors are more important.
Now, what reviews do though, is they’re social proof. Nobody wants to buy a book where nobody else has reviewed it yet. Like, I mean, do you want to be the first person to pay money and test this and find out it’s terrible? And quite frankly, as a shopper, sometimes I’m deciding if I really want to read that book because I see, oh, well, they only have 12 reviews.
Let’s not be that big of a deal. Or this one has a thousand reviews and then 4. 7. Clearly it must be good. It does help with the buying. And I think that that decision matrix affects your rankings more so than just the sheer number of reviews. So if people keep picking up the thousand review book over the 17 review book, Amazon’s going to see that and switch it over time.
So with regards to marketing, I do tell people, it is important that when you go to publish your book, I’m not gonna lie. I always have, you know, 25 to 50 people on an Excel sheet. They’re friends, they’re colleagues, they’re, you know, acquaintances, church members, they’re, you know, Bible study group, you know, group people.
It’s people I’ve, I’ve met on the internet. It’s friends. Hey, it might be you, Jared, next time. No, I’m just kidding. But the point though, is I have this list. I go to them and I say, Hey, you know, I just came out with this book. I’d really love for you to leave a review. Um, you know, and if you haven’t read my book yet, that’s okay.
Just kind of leave a review about, you know, myself. And this is one way to at least drive, you know, some 20, 30, you know, reviews. And that way, when I start my marketing of the book, there’s a like there. People are like, Oh, wow, it’s a new book. Wow. It’s getting me into these reviews. And it just allows me to kind of.
Get about the rest and to succeed. And anybody can do that. You can start building your list as you’re writing your book and putting it together. You can start preparing for that, but you just want to get enough reviews to show life so that people aren’t afraid to buy your book and feel more confident in buying your book.
Jared: Let’s talk about a little bit of a timeline for people to maybe get their minds wrapped around a practical approach to this, because these, this has been great so far. And I feel like. A lot of people, me included, are like, I just want to go write my next book. I’ve already written a ton of content for a website or two.
I want to turn it into a book now. But what’s a reasonable timeline, a reasonable set of expectations in terms of number of books tickets sold? I realize it’s a big question. I realize a lot of it’s dependent upon how competitive the niche you go into and, and a lot of factors. But again, just from a high level to give people a mindset, like, What kind of, um, sales revenue should people be expecting?
How, how long does it take to generate this? Uh, what are the targets that people should look to?
Dave: Boy, that is a really big question. There’s a lot of ways that I would say the word that depends, but I understand why you’re asking the question then. So I’m going to try to generalize, uh, so as to give a good answer.
Um, I believe that, so let me first with the depends parts, okay? So people can kind of help to see the range of what I’m about to say. And then I will, I will nail my feet to the ground and try to put some generalized answers. Okay. I know how that goes, Jared. All right. So
Jared: I have to ask, I, I know, I, I hate to I’d hate to be asked it, but I’m the host and I have to ask the question, because I’m sure a lot of people are somewhat thinking, right?
Dave: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so when we’re talking about books, there’s a big thing between fiction and non fiction, and maybe there are people listening to fiction, so I’m going to give that one, okay? Fiction takes a lot longer to write. Just a lot longer. Um, it’s, it’s a harder skill. Uh, it really is something that takes a good time.
Because I’m there to be entertained, and you can’t get by with just facts, right, in teaching. So, I would say that if you decide that you want to do a fiction, maybe on your first one, you’re looking at 6 to 12 months to come up with something. Again, people can do things faster. With regards to non fiction, I’m going to say the time to create depends, because if we talked about you’ve already created the content before, and you’re compiling it, and you’re using AI as like a muse or an assistant, you could really crank something out in, in weeks, you know?
Um, with regards to writing a nonfiction, honestly, it’s, I’m pretty hardcore about it, but I’m also really specific about the way I do it. Um, I would say, but I’m also really disciplined about my writing too. I, every morning I wake up, every morning from five to seven, I’m always writing. So, I usually get a good, uh, nonfiction out every, uh, month and a half, uh, just in the writing components.
Now, with regards to putting your book together, I would say that you’re probably looking anywhere between, um, Uh, on average, I would say maybe 200 to 300 to put it together. Uh, you can, you know, with regards to editing, I do recommend getting an editor. But that being said though, is the first couple of books I created, my editor was myself, my wife, um, and one of my best buddies and they were, I felt confident that they would read it.
And let me tell you, my wife read marked everything and yeah, totally killed my self esteem, but it was great. Um, and I was able to cut that cost. But I do think getting a good cover, there were great covers out there, like the Monza make some, um, there’s also, you know, I have a list of like some of these really good, affordable, uh, cover designers on Kindlepreneur.
And you can go in there, click, see what they have. You can also buy a prebuilt one where somebody has already made one. And if you like it, you can just change the title. Um, and you can look at somewhere anywhere between a hundred to 200 for that. With regards to formatting your book, I think that’s incredibly important.
I do recommend that if you intend to write. Um, you know, more than one book, I definitely recommend getting a book formatting software, um, because you could go to a formatter and it could cost about 200, uh, to build that, um, book. And by the way, if you made a mistake or you got to change something, pay them again.
Uh, there’s a great software out there called Atticus. You can find it at Atticus. io. It’s 147 lifetime. That helps you to build a. Um, ebook and a print book. It’s super easy to put together. Um, and like I said, it’s, I mean, it pays for itself pretty much on the first thing. And now you have your collection there.
And if you need to update your book or add to it, it’s super easy. And you just hit export. You’re good to go after that. Um, your costs, it depends if you want to start doing advertising on Amazon, you’re adding maybe another 50 to a hundred bucks, just kind of spruce it up. Um, yeah. So that’s kind of the cost.
That’s the time and the cost. With expectations, uh, there’s a couple of depends on that. I mean, for example, if you did your keyword research and you see that there’s like, say 2000 people a month typing in, um, you know, Evernote for authors. Right. And you know, there’s only one other book there. You can actually start to pre calculate how much money you can make a month from the book.
And that’s a wonderful thing. I mean, talk about giving you more motivation in writing and knowing here is an opportunity. Um, and so. I would say that you’re looking at anywhere between, you know, 50 box that you make from a book to thousands. Um, and I know that’s a bit of a range, but it really comes down to your keyword research or it comes down to, uh, you know, your reach.
Case in point, going back to my buddy who had the Blurry Creatures, uh, podcast and made that public domain. Uh, last I heard they made over 100, 000 on their first month. And that was because. That book, Book of Enoch, is highly searched after. And B, they have an incredibly popular podcast full of people who are hungry for more information, and they constantly talk about the Book of Enoch.
So, for them, I mean, it was a slam dunk and then some. Um, but again, it comes down to how many people are searching for it on Amazon, how much competition is there. How much weight do you have? So I would say you’re looking, you know, a range between 50 to thousand. To be clear, I think
Jared: you answered that really, really well.
You somehow answered it while also outlining kind of a step by step process for people to go through in getting their book out on Amazon and probably highlighted a couple of the technical aspects that are really important. It’s not just as simple as writing the book and taking your Google doc and publishing it, you gotta go through some of these steps to make sure that Amazon can read it, the Kindle side of things can line up.
Uh, The KDP all works together. Um, so thank you. And that just gives people some perspective. I mean, um, you, you touched on it. You touched on the fact that you’re producing books constantly. Let’s talk about, at least for a little bit, the scale component here. What, what is the difference between publishing one book and then publishing books consistently?
Why would someone want to start to look into a more, uh, consistent publishing schedule, publishing multiple books? Um, and I’m wondering maybe if you could just give people that side of the coin, the, the scaling out of publishing.
Dave: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s what allowed me to quit the Navy and go, you know, work 100 percent from home.
Um, when I wrote my first book, you know, I was making about 2, 000 a month. When I wrote my second book, I was making an extra 1, 000 a month. That was 3, 000 a month. That I was getting from my books. So there is the stacking of your assets. Okay. Each book is an asset. It’s a revenue generator. Um, and so you can start to build your assets that way.
The other thing that I learned too, is the more books I had, the better I did. Um, and that’s because people who bought my first book, I’d put in the back of my book, they call it, um, the also buy section. Okay. And I would say, Hey, here’s the, if you love this, check out my other books. And so people who would buy one of my books would go and buy a second book.
I also had content upgrades inside of my books, especially in non fiction. So, if you buy my book, hey, sign up for my email list and I will send you
Jared: this.
Dave: You know, and one of my favorite things, by the way, this is like my secret sauce. When I worked with Pat Flynn, I helped him do this on his book and it went like gangbusters.
He had his book and he created a little mini course. Now that mini course, I mean, it was only a couple of slides. Um, a couple of videos put together. It was very quick and it went over certain sections of the book. Then in pass, he had to write in the front, Hey, download my mini course, you know, and. Who’s not going to do that?
And I saw two thirds of his sales turn into an email subscriber. Okay. So they could get the mailing course. Not only does that help with sales, because look, if I’m looking at two different books and I see one is, you know, a book and the other is a book plus a free course, I’m picking the book plus a free course.
And then I’m signing up for it. So I started collecting emails from all of my shoppers. I had people who were actually more connected with me because they heard my voice and they watched my course and they felt more connected and they felt like they got more out of it. Um, and so it made it that as I did the second, third and fourth book, it made it so much easier to sell.
It made my marketing efforts right out of the gate that much faster. Um, so that’s a wonderful benefit to writing more. The other thing too, is I have my go to cover designer. I have my go to editor. I have my process in place. When I finished writing my book, I know exactly who to go to and how to do it.
And so it’s honestly project management at that point, uh, as, as the book goes through the conveyor. And so I’m now more efficient at writing. And so when you write more books, honestly, the best way to put it is you get more efficient and you get more.
Jared: How, um, to give you more perspective on book sales, uh, is it set it and forget it?
Is there an ongoing maintenance you need to do? What is a life, what’s the shelf life of a,
Dave: of a book you create? That’s a great question. And again, it’s a little bit of a depends. Um, so a lot of my books have lived for seven plus years and then some, um, you know, always bringing in sales now, a lot of that.
Is because, um, you know, like for example, I have some niche websites that constantly feed them traffic and Amazon constantly sees that my books do well. And so Amazon constantly keeps mine at the top of the serves. That works out well. I have another book that isn’t attached to an affiliate, uh, or to one of my niche websites.
And that particular book has a great ad system that’s set up. I know that for every, you know, 20 I pay, I get a hundred dollars. And so I just keep that continuously going. And what’s beautiful about that system is Amazon sees my book is constantly selling and so Amazon continues to show it. And so it does.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of people who they said, and they forget it, they’ll build, they’ll make a book, they’ll do a little bit of marketing, they’ll throw it up there, you know, and if they didn’t get some of these things that we talked about, right, or let’s say, you know, the book didn’t do well, um, you know, maybe a lot of spelling errors or, you know, poorly done, maybe a bad cover.
These kinds of things can hinder it, and right off the gate, after the marketing is done, you’ll see it kind of peter off. So, it really depends on a couple of things there, but that’s kind of a highlight of the two different ways that they can look.
Jared: You took my next question right out of my mouth. Let’s talk to the people who have already published, and it went nowhere.
Maybe it went somewhere out of the gate, maybe it’s been 10 years, 5 years, and so sales have slowed down, like, what do you do if you follow all these steps, and the book is not getting the kind of traction that you want it to get?
Dave: Oh man, I, so a long time ago, I used to have a podcast on book marketing and, um, my favorite session we would do is called reviving a dead book.
And I would bring somebody in who did this, not so that it wasn’t just me constantly teaching it, but it was people who did it and saw results. And so what I say to people that have had a book that came out, all right, first off, um, I would say, do the research. If you haven’t done keyword research, do the research and verify.
Are people even looking for your kind of book? Okay. Bye. Now, it doesn’t mean you can’t revive a book and it doesn’t mean you can’t sell it. It just means that if you do the keyword research and you find that people are not looking for your kind of book, then that changes your marketing tactic because now you know that Amazon will not work to sell it for you.
Okay. It just won’t. It’s not going to help because nobody on Amazon is searching for it. Got it. Right. That means that you need to do what I call interruptive marketing. That means you’ve got to go find the market somewhere and bring them to, to you, to your book. Now, if you can’t do that, use that as a kind of a decision tree for yourself.
If I always search up for my book, I don’t have the ability to bring people to it, then you can at least save yourself some calories and not move forward on that unless it’s a true passion. However, though, if let’s say you do your keyword research and you find that Amazon is, oh man, they’re, you know, like, people are searching for it.
Or, You’ve improved in your marketing or you have an email list, you have ways to kind of inject, you know, life back into the book. Then one of the things I would do is I would look at what went wrong. Because if people are searching for your book or if you have a following but it didn’t do well, something’s off.
Um, I would start by looking at your cover, giving it a really good look. One of the things I love doing with people is I like to take my cover art and I might take the cover title off, okay? And I will shrink the image down to the size it would look on Amazon search engine. And I will hand that paper, a print off of what that looks like, to somebody and I would ask them, Hey, what do you think this book’s about?
And the answers I get are so illuminating. One time I did this with an author and they had this, it was actually a book on writing. And they had this typewriter, okay, on their book cover. And the typewriter, it was like an old retro typewriter. But here’s the kicker. When you shrunk the cover down to the size it would look on Amazon, the typewriter looked like a toilet.
Oh, yeah. Unless you were really looking at the details. But remember, people scroll quickly. So here is the thing, talking about how to write well, and there’s a toilet. Now, you could say that’s jarring and shocking, right? You know, like, oh man, maybe people stopped and looked at it. No, no, it just, it just, it didn’t look good.
Um, the same thing goes with, you know, your details. You put these tiny little details or even with your title. I’ve seen people make these really intricate titles to the point that when you shrink it down, it just looks like a blob. It doesn’t look neat. The other thing too is I was once working with a, um, it was a thriller crime novelist, okay.
And she wrote like, we’re talking like deadly bloody and all that. And I saw the cover and I was like, all right, we’re going to do my little test here, uh, because I know exactly what the problem is. Um, so we took the cover and we went to a whole bunch of people that don’t know what she wrote. Every one of them thought, Oh, it’s a, it’s like a.
A comedy, uh, maybe a girl boss, you know, detective. And she’s like, well, they’re, it is a female detective. Yeah, maybe it’s like that romance. Is it spicy? I mean, no joke. Everybody we went to was thinking it was some, you know, comedy romance thing. No, you know what the problem was? She used a hot pink, like a neon pink in the back skylight, and it had a, you know, femme fatale, you know, shadow.
And I’m like, see, your cover says to me, it is not a deadly, scary thriller. It’s telling me it’s what everybody else is saying. So clearly there was a disconnect between what the story was and what the cover was. And that really killed her sales. And when she changed that, it was a dramatic shift in her sales.
All her marketing efforts worked way better. Um, same thing with your book description. Take a look at that. Try to identify. My point though, is it’s really important for people to figure out where the problem went and then fix it. One of the ways I love doing this is with Amazon ads. So Amazon ads gives me the numbers to actually figure out where the problem is.
You see, I can set up my Amazon ads and if I say get 20, 000 people to see my book cover and nobody clicks on it, well, there you go, right? Something’s wrong with my cover. Nobody cares because I got 20, 000 people to see my book and nobody interacted. Now, let’s say I have 20, 000 people and I have a hundred people click on my book, but nobody buys it.
And that tells me there’s something wrong with my book description. Because people saw the cover, they saw the title, they got interested. And when they went to my book sales page, crickets. Nothing got them to buy. And so I’ve used that little kind of number scale to help figure out where the problem is and then fix the problem.
Now once you’ve fixed the problem, uh, it’s wonderful for you to either, uh, republish. Some people can actually pull the book off. Amazon, and then a couple of days later, put it back on. You have a chance of losing your reviews, but one of the things about that is maybe the reviews are something you want to get rid of, but when you republish it, um, Amazon gives you the honeymoon period again, you get to spruce it up.
You get to inject it with life, find better keywords, and then that’s a great way to kind of revive your sales.
Jared: I love everything you said. It reminds me of Timothy Ferris’s approach that I read about when he launched for our work week and it somewhat similar. I remember reading that his title was based, he had like 10 titles, I’m making up the exact number and he went out with Google ads and he just basically had 10 different versions, uh, titles of his book and the one that clearly won out in terms of ad performance on Google, it ended up being the 4 hour work week.
Dave: Yep. One of his, one of his titles that I still remember that I thought was hilarious was, Broadbands and White Sands, right? And that was, I, I’m pretty sure if memory serves me correctly, that was actually his personal favorite title. The People Spoke. And to this day, Four Hour Workweek is a just famous book and it really set the tone.
You know, we know what this book is going to be about. Broadbands and White Sands, not really
Jared: there. And we’re all victim of getting a little too cute sometimes, I suppose. That was definitely a little too cute. Yeah. Okay. So that was, that was, uh, that was really good. Thank you. Um, I will share that I am victim of, I published a book 10 years ago and it went nowhere.
So that was kind of a personal question, but I’ve got to imagine I have colleagues, I have friends. We’ve dabbled in it and I’m sure a certain segment of the audience has published something on Amazon and is listening going like, well, what the heck do I do with this? Do I, what do I do to start over or what do I do to kickstart it again?
So Hey, talk a little bit about the success you’ve had in terms of publishing on Amazon. We didn’t do that at the outset. I want to make sure we have enough time to get to all your tips. People can learn more about Kindlepreneur. That’ll be my next question. But, what type of success have you had in terms of publishing?
How long have you been doing it? How many books do you have live? Any numbers you’re comfortable sharing with us.
Dave: Yeah, so, since, uh, publishing. Let’s see, my first, oh boy. I gotta think back. Uh, 8, 9, 10 years ago? Somewhere, was when I first started. Um, I’ve since done 10 books. Uh, those 10 books have collectively brought over 750, 000, uh, by themselves.
And, uh, every month consistently bringing in at least 7, 000 to 14, 000, depending on the season, I would like to spend a lot more time writing. Um, considering, but, you know, running Publisher Rocket and Kindle Printer, I still write every morning, but sometimes I’m writing scripts for YouTube videos.
Sometimes I’m writing the latest article to help teach. Um, but it is just one of those things where I’ve always actually wanted to get into a fiction book, but that’s more of a passion project.
Jared: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. So 10 books, quite a bit of earnings, quite a bit of passive income. And when we say passive, obviously reference back to what we just talked about, but income coming in.
So you created Kindlepreneur, um, and full disclosure, like a lot of times, uh, in the podcast world, like, you know, we’ll get pitched on people coming on to talk about, uh, something like an Amazon publishing in order to, to, to, you know, bring attention to what they’re doing. I found you on my own because I was interested in publishing on Kindle and here we are to this day.
I think what you publish is really helpful. I think what you publish on Kindlepreneur is really helpful. So I’ll just kind of throw my personal hat in the ring. That’s how you ended up on this podcast. When did you decide to create that and talk about what you can find on Kindlepreneur?
Dave: Yeah, and here’s a little fun part too about mine.
Um, I’ve never leveraged Kindlepreneur to make my book sales. Um, one of the things I’ve always done, especially to stay on top of things, is that every time I come out with a book, I always use a new pen name. Um, because I need to learn because Amazon’s always doing something crazy different. And so Every time I’m writing about something, it’s because I’m starting just like you without a following, without a giant blog or an email list.
I mean, believe so much did, but it’s still, I love the process. And so, um, that’s kind of one of the reasons why I started can opener was when I first discovered, you know, the Amazon SEO and the A9 algorithm, uh, it was, nobody was writing about it. Like a lot of people were focusing on, Hey, here’s how to sell, publish a book.
And then here’s how to sell it. Um, nobody was kind of, I’ve got an engineering background, so I’ve got like a little bit of a whole, Hey, let’s test and tweak these things. And since nobody talked about it, I wanted to start building that out. And so my goal with every one of my articles is to write. So basically to teach something that you can take, turn around and do and see results.
Uh, so I don’t write a lot of flood pieces. I don’t, you know, uh, I really want to educate on each piece. And so for me, I like to write how I like to read. Give me the stuff, give it to me straight and give me practical things that I can do right now. It’s really
Jared: great. It’s to your point. I think, um, I’ve been in the online publishing world, we’ll say for well over a decade.
I think there was a period where there was such an amazement that we could all self publish that it’s almost like the world skipped all the technical aspects of self publishing, right? And I remember in, You know, in the, in the, the, the time periods that have followed, I think that you are filling quite an interesting niche, which is, Hey, there’s lots of writers out there, but that doesn’t mean that people are getting book sales.
Dave: Yeah. Well, you know, what’s funny is, is that the world of writing has changed a lot because back when I first started, the publishing companies used to thumb their nose at the self publishers. They used to think, ah, it’s self publishing. Yeah, it’s not real. As a matter of fact, most of them didn’t even play well with Amazon.
They didn’t do Amazon ads. Like I said earlier, I’ve done a whole bunch of consulting for major publishing companies and it’s teaching them, okay, this is how you do Amazon ads, which by the way, I make them all watch that amscourse. com thing, just first watch that before I show up, um, and you know, they’ve started to really understand the importance of the Amazon marketplace.
But now today, I would say that a major source of the publishing companies, they’re looking at self publishers and hiring them or signing them from there. Because they see, Hey, self publishers, these people, I can look at their numbers. I can see that they’re selling well, that people enjoy their books, that they’re good writers.
I don’t even need to read their book. I see 4, 000 reviews and say, this person knows how to write. Then on top of that too, these writers know how to market. And let me tell you, there’s no better way to talk to a publishing company than if you know how to market, you know how to do things. Then they want to come up beside you and help you and help both grow.
So it’s a really cool shift from we were thumbed and looked down upon to now, like, we’re like free agents in the NFL.
Jared: That’s awesome. Dave, thank you for coming on. Um, if people want to go see more about what he’s doing, I know you’re at kindrepreneur. com. You referenced amscourse. com. We’ll get those links in the show notes.
Um, uh, so thanks again. I think this is, this is a really fascinating interview. I think people are going to really love this. A lot of people, again, just to put it in, Full circle, like a lot of people that listen to this podcast are publishers. They’ve been publishing content in a variety of places, whether it’s their website or social media or an email list, and this is another avenue for people to use those skillsets towards, and I just thank you for giving us so many details.
So thanks for coming on. Absolutely. And again, thanks for having me. Sure thing. But until we get to talk again, until we talk again, thanks, Dave. We’ll see you soon.