Top Ten Things We Learned After Doing Amazon KDP For a Year
It’s been a year since we started this journey of publishing in Amazon KDP, and we’ve learned quite a few things along the way. This list is in no particular order of importance, so I’d say they’re all equally valuable lessons.
1. Creating a Facebook Page for your business is essential! We created a Facebook page almost immediately after starting our business and seemed like a no-brainer. The idea behind it was, that we would post regularly, increase our following, then eventually open a commerce shop associated with the page once we had enough followers. We created a catalog import file in the meantime, adding products to this spreadsheet as we published books on Amazon. However, our page was flagged for not complying with Facebook rules. After some research, we found out what our mistakes were. When creating posts, we can’t use website link shorteners (such as bitly) in the post because it would seem as if we were being shady, sending visitors to places that have nothing to do with what the post is about. Creating ads against posts like this is also frowned upon. Another thing to look out for is sharing posts in groups that do not allow promotions. I think we accidentally shared posts from our page with the wrong groups several times. Not a good look.
2. Another thing we learned is how important social media is to our business. At the beginning of our journey, we started with Facebook and Twitter. As time went on, we also signed on to Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok. Exposure to potentially hundreds or thousands of people is very important. However, we also learned that you can’t bombard your followers with products all the time, so you need to post other things besides business-related information. Post about today’s National <INSERT RANDOM CELEBRATION> Day and add enough hashtags to get people to notice your posts and reels. So which platforms do we get the most attention on? Surprisingly, we get the most attention on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Videos usually perform better, but normal posts will work if the content is good, and you use plenty of relevant hashtags. Pinterest is interesting because you would need to create your pins and organize them in folders that contain keywords people are looking for.
3. Copyrighted images and documents should be avoided at all costs. When we first started publishing, we didn’t know where to get images from. There are so many “free” image sites out there, and if they say the images are free to use commercially then it’s good, right? Not always. In order to keep away from copyrighted material, we purchased the Pro version of Canva and have stayed away from any other sources for images – except our own cameras. In Canva, we use an image from their collection, then add other elements to the design to make it unique. This guarantees that we won’t get hit with any copyright issues. As far as copyrighted documents are concerned, we learned early from others that copying “public domain” books are a sure way to get your Amazon KDP account terminated. There are so many people who think it’s worth the gamble, but this is a practice that Amazon explicitly does not condone, and you’ll never see a public domain book published by us.
4. Keywords, keywords, keywords! This is something that we need to improve as we publish more and more books. Keyword research is the most important thing you need to do in order to sell your books. We use a combination of tools to gather the keywords we need, including Publisher Rocket, Helium 10, and Book Bolt. There are also two schools of thought about how to use the 7 keyword slots for the books you publish – keyword stuffing and long tail keywords. I found the most success in using simple long tail keywords in these slots than stuffing single words and short phrases into these boxes. Other people might have a different experience with their preferred method, and who knows, maybe I’ll keep experimenting with these options as time goes on in order to improve sales. The bottom line is if you want a successful book launch, use long sentences in your title and subtitle THAT MAKE SENSE, have a great description with plenty of information, and make sure your keywords are well researched.
5. A+ Content is more important now than ever before. A few months ago, Amazon KDP announced a new low-content option when uploading books, which means that low-content books no longer need a bar code printed on the back. The downside to this is that low-content books won’t have a “Look Inside” feature on their product page. In order to show off the pages inside the book, you will need to add A+ Content. The more sections you add to describe the interior of the book, the better your book will appear to prospective customers.
6. We found that Amazon ads are absolutely important to get more book sales. We have received much more sales with ads than without ads. The downside of using Amazon ads is that you need to fine-tune the ads until they cost you the least amount of money relative to how many sales you receive from them. If you decide to use Amazon ads to promote your books, you need to realize that you WILL spend a lot of money in Q4 (October through December), but you will also generate the most sales. Can you sell books without running ads? Of course, you can, but organic sales seem to come very infrequently when you first start out. We are still learning as we go with this topic, so I’m sure there will be more to add as time goes on.
7. We paid for a Canva Pro account, and this became our bread and butter. We use it to create book interiors and covers, social media posts and videos, mockups for Amazon and Etsy, and designs for Redbubble. Since we’ve done this, we don’t really need to worry much about copyright issues with images, fonts, and videos. It’s a lot easier to use than Adobe products (believe me, we tried other options first) and we can create books, printables, and social media posts in minutes. We aren’t affiliates for Canva (that would be cool), so obviously they’re not paying us to promote them. Having said that, I highly suggest others invest in this tool unless they are already comfortable with another design tool.
8. We learned that when you upload the manuscript and cover when publishing on KDP, the Launch Preview sometimes takes forever to be ready for that preview. In order to bypass that, we wait until we see that our uploaded file no longer shows “processing”. Then, when both files are done processing, the Launch Preview option shows the preview immediately. Does it really save you time? Absolutely not! Either way, Amazon takes however long to process the files before the preview. This is really just to give you the illusion that the preview is actually working faster!
9. Sometimes it’s necessary to take a break from secondary income streams in order to focus on your primary income stream. We have a Redbubble store that we started early on, but we didn’t release many designs, and the designs we did put out there were not great. We decided to stop uploading designs to Redbubble in order to focus on our KDP business, which is what wanted to do since the beginning. Now that we have had some moderate success publishing books on KDP, we recently decided to start uploading designs on Redbubble again. We also started an Etsy store to sell digital products such as greeting cards and math printables. And guess what? Everything revolves around proper keyword research, which we mentioned earlier!
10. Most recently we learned about creating a series page on Amazon KDP. A series page will showcase a subset of your books that have something in common. When you add books to your series page, a link to the series page will appear on the book’s product page. In anticipation of Q4, we added all the kids’ coloring books, activity books, and workbooks into a series page named “Kids Corner at Sunset Creative Publishing”. It’s too soon to know if this will bring more eyes to our products during the holiday season, but it’s just another thing we are trying in order to increase sales.
We have had a lot of fun on our journey publishing on Amazon KDP this past year. We learned so much along the way, too much to even add to a list but all equally valuable. We hope you gained some value from what we shared here today. If so, please comment below, check out our books listed on our product page, and subscribe to all our various social media platforms!