How to Make $1000 a Month Using Amazon

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2014 was a great year for my publishing efforts. I had my best year yet for book sales, selling just over 3,600 books split over 32 titles, totaling over $11,000 in sales. My goal was to get to $1,000 in book sales per month, and I have now hit that for the last three months.

My best selling book, Blank Sheet Music for Guitar,sold over 1,000 copies. I also have some books that sold just one copy. Most of my sales come from my paperback books sold through CreateSpace/Amazon, using their print-on-demand service. I am completely in the non-fiction area of the market with books in music, geography, children’s, business and coloring, so I do much better with paperbacks then I do with Kindle.

Over the past few years I have learned a lot about publishing books, and I’d like to share a few of the major lessons I learned.

Lesson #1: Don’t Rely on Amazon

My number one bookselling tip is that you need to market your books outside of Amazon. Amazon will help, but it’s up to you to carry the bulk of the effort.

I sell books in five different markets but two of them make up most of my sales: 1) music instruction/writing and 2) geography. For both of these markets, I have built websites that heavily highlight the content of the books and then drop ads in around the edges with direct links to Amazon.

For my music books, I createdAcousticMusicTV.com and featured one of my main books, Essential Chords for Guitar, Mandolin, Ukulele and Banjo. I created a web graphic for each page of the book, dropped in good descriptions (including alt tags, which search engines focus on) and ads along the sides, linked to Amazon.

The graphics attracted Google traffic and the ads on the sides generate book sales via Amazon. I also set up a mailing list and a 12-step auto responder series that gives away additional PDF samples of the book alongside a sales section linked to Amazon to drive even more traffic to my Amazon sales pages.

Notice that, although I don’t rely on Amazon to generate sales for me, all my marketing efforts do point there. My websites drive traffic to Amazon. All book videos have calls to action to buy the books on Amazon. All my Pinterest graphics are linked to their matching book on Amazon. I also cross-sell inside of my books. Each book highlights other books in the series. Everything points to Amazon, allowing me to concentrate all of the traffic I get on my sales pages on Amazon.

Do you need to master the Amazon self-publishing learning curve?  If so then you might want to look at Our online Webinar called “How to Get Published, Sell Books & Attract Tens of Thousands of Readers by Selling Your Content on Amazon’s Kindle” CLICK HERE!  It takes you through then entire process from devising the content, to scheduling writing to formatting, proof-reading and marketing.

Lesson #2: Pay Attention to Research and Stats

When I have an idea for a book, I look at similar books and their reviews on Amazon. For my blank sheet music books, I discovered a couple of key things missing in many blank sheet music books—and I made sure these things were included in my books and highlighted in the sales copy.

Doing research can also help you discover a large market—for me, it was coloring books—so you can create books that people are already interested in buying.

Lesson #3: Focus on Volume

On the book publishing side of my business, I am well aware that I work in a world of 1% conversions—just like direct mail. You need traffic and lots of it. That is why I work so hard to make my content so easy to find and why I give so much away. I expect most people to look and not buy. But that doesn’t stop me from always rewarding the website visitor with what they are looking for, along with the option to buy a book.

For me, traffic numbers are super important. That’s where I focus my attention in terms of marketing and statistics and I constantly work on my website content to attract visitors.

Lesson #4: Keep Publishing

You just don’t know what is going to work—even with all the research and stats. You need to keep creating new books and continually publishing because, even when you’ve been doing this a while, you’ll still get surprised. I tend to find that the books I work on the most and the longest tend to sell the least. The books I get out quicker tend to sell more. Maybe when you work on a book for a long time, by the time you get it out you missed the trend? I don’t know.

My advice? Keep creating and publishing.If you lack inspiration then you might want to try the advice and writing hacks that are suggested in Our Get It Done Writer's Toolkit  CLICK HERE! This is a ebook/audio CD comb that can teach you how to brainstorm as well as overcome writer's block and procrastination. It will also help you stay on schedule and meet writing goals so you can finish that project and go on to the next one and keep publishing!

This guest article was originally written by Bruce Jones, who is a Make Market Launch IT graduate and it was published on www.businessacceleratorblog.com.

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