The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Chris: If you take a course content and more matter what it is, and you put it into book format, and you put links to unlisted, exclusive video content or access to private member communities, or private one-on-one access to you as an expert or as a coach, then you can sell a book for a lot more.
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[00:00:39] Jason: KDP is a tremendous opportunity for e-commerce operators of all varieties with many business models. And in this episode, we’re going to pick the brain of Mr. Chris green, alleged gender in the e-commerce space. And talk about his. Kendall. I’ll also share some of my experiences, Kyle and Michael, I think you’re going to be asking questions on this show, but maybe they got their hot takes as well.
[00:01:35] We’ll jump into it together, guys. You ready to do. We are
[00:01:37] Kyle: ready? Yes. Ready? I I’m gonna begin a KTP genius
[00:01:42] Jason: after this.
[00:01:47] All right. Well, why don’t we kick it off with Chris? You share in a little journey of, of, you know, self publishing, like KDP and, or create space, the old name that we used to call it. And then I’ll do the same and then we’ll go from there. Yeah cause Jason,
[00:01:59] Chris: I know you’ve published a lot. You’ve been traditional publishing as well as self publishing.
[00:02:03] And I think my goal for this is anybody that’s listening by the end. I would just want them to be really excited and understand the opportunities that are out there because I think a lot of people would have coached hundreds of thousands of people. When you think about self publishing and writing books, and it’s like a lot of business owners, especially Amazon sellers are going to think this doesn’t make sense.
[00:02:23] How is this going to apply to me? I’m not trying to write. I’m not Stephen King and all the stuff he’s like, I understand that. And it’s not just Kindle. So we say Kendall, we say KTP, which stands for Kindle direct publishing. It’s not just. Like downloads through the Kindle store. KDP now offers a paperbacks as well as hard backs.
[00:02:41] And it’s by bringing over their older platform creates space, which is where Jason, I know you. And I go way back. I published my first book in 2011, so it’s been like 10 years. So now that everything’s under one platform under one place, KTP I don’t want people to be confused like Kindle. No, I don’t want to do Kindle through KDP, you can.
[00:02:59] Physical products, paperbacks and hardbacks, which to me just opens the door to so many more opportunities, especially to physical product sellers on Amazon. So the first book that I published arbitrage was a retail arbitrage back in 2001. I did it really just to answer people’s questions about FBA 2011 was very early with FBA.
[00:03:20] So I wrote this really long PDF that answered everybody’s questions, the most common questions that were repeated questions. And as I published it, I was like, wait a minute, I’ll put it out here as a book. And it was like really easy. And like everybody thought I was hot stuff because I published a book.
[00:03:34] I didn’t publish a book to become hot stuff, but I could see this pattern where like, oh my gosh, people really want. Like authors people have published materials. It led to keynote speeches at different events where I was like, I was the FBA guy and being a published author, led to some of that. And since then I’ve been using KDP in, I would just say creative ways, not just ways to publish content but ways to create products that bring value.
[00:03:58] To people, whether you’re an Amazon seller or a coach or anything that you’re doing, I promise there are ways to use KDP to really elevate and differentiate yourself. And it’s, it’s just so good. I’ve, I’ve dabbled in every single Amazon platform. And I repeatedly say KTP is the most powerful of all of the platforms or the things you can do with it.
[00:04:20] And today on the show, I’m going to prove to you why.
[00:04:22] Jason: Oh, dude. That’s awesome. Love it. Love it. Love it. Okay. We’re going to have that proof coming up in just a few moments. Okay. So my story with Kindle publishing KDP is that I wanted to be a writer for a long time. And you know, my background was non-profit management and, but I was a as a marketer for our kitchen table entrepreneurship.
[00:04:44] And and one of the things that caught fire for us in 2010, 2011, I guess, was a Pinterest. And so it was just, it, it had exponentially blown up the traffic on our site and back then we were on a WordPress site, but Pinterest was just amazing. And I wanted to get the word out. So I just started blogging and I made a blog on my Christmas vacation from work, and I did something like, I think it was 22 or 24 blog posts, articles in like two weeks.
[00:05:13] I just cranked every topic you can think of for Pinterest, the blog still out there. It’s so ugly, but it’s marketing on pinterest.com and I got contacted literally two weeks into it by an author who reached out and said, I’m under contract to write a book I’m on Pinterest marketing, but I don’t really know that much about it.
[00:05:32] I’m just an author. And you seem to be the expert because at that time, no one had any marketing on Pinterest content. You know, on Google. So Mike, my articles immediately populated right to the top of the charts for all the key phrases, which is just insane to think about. But so nonetheless, we got into this deal together.
[00:05:49] I was the kind of subject matter expert you could say, but I was learning as I was going. But, you know, it was kind of like that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king type thing or whatever. I just, I knew enough about marketing in general to put together a battle plan and to express the details.
[00:06:06] So anyway, so that book came out with McGraw hill, it’s called Pinterest power. And, but right before it came. I was like, you know, I got other things percolating. I’m not a one trick pony. I don’t want to just be a Pinterest guru. So what I realized I could do is self-publish two or three or four books in the six month period while the publishers were making that book real, you know, in their slow process.
[00:06:30] So I just knocked out several eBooks on you know, KDP, paperback and Kindle versions. And then when. Pinterest power came. It came out, it just had a lot of energy on Amazon in particular. And then there, I was with my other books. So I kind of approach it from a catalog business mindset from the beginning.
[00:06:50] And that was, I guess, 2000 early, 2012, something like that. And have used it in various ways for the last 10 years and integrated in different way, you know streams of ideas on and off Amazon. And so that’s sort of my, my journey with it. So.
[00:07:05] Chris: So I got you beat 2011 versus 2012,
[00:07:08] Jason: man. You you’re, you’re a pioneer man here.
[00:07:10] Pioneer. Okay.
[00:07:12] Chris: Accidental, pioneer, right? Like, yeah. I didn’t mean to become an author. Just like kind of you, well, you said you you’ve always wanted to kind of be a writer. I didn’t mean to become a writer, but after seeing how people reacted to wait a minute here, you’ve published a book about FBA. Yeah.
[00:07:26] Whoa. I was like, I see how this works. And in 2011, I remember thinking it was this. That everybody’s going to do it. And when everybody does it, it’s going to be ruined. And here we are 10 years later, it’s not ruined it’s better than ever. And I don’t see any time in the near future or in our lifetimes. It being ruined in the sense of books, not having some level of authority and books being a great way that people want to consume information and learn information.
[00:07:52] I don’t see that going away for.
[00:07:55] Jason: Yeah, no, I totally agree. It’s still a viable path to building a community and spreading your word and, and promoting your business or your, you know, your, your, whatever else you do beyond just the book itself as the product. And so, yeah, I’m a huge fan as well. I guess my hot tips are going to be sort of extensions of KDP, how to integrate it with other ideas and other platforms and other ways I know you’ve got.
[00:08:21] Takes as well. Kyle and Michael, what are your initial thoughts on KDP? Or just any questions so far about what we’re talking about? Sure. I
[00:08:27] Kyle: mean, I guess what I’m
[00:08:29] Jason: hearing is essentially
[00:08:33] Kyle: my paradigm of KDP and self-publishing is too narrow. Like I’m thinking. Okay. If I want to use KDP, I just need to be an author or I need to hire a ghost writer and create my romance novel series.
[00:08:45] And then I’m selling that on Kendall. You know, it’s like, you see those available for sale. You can buy a collections and stuff. I was like, okay, I get it. You know, you find a niche you get in that niche. Either you hire somebody to write your stuff, or you’re the writer and you’re putting it out there and you’re hoping to make, you know, multiple dollars on the sales of your.
[00:09:02] But what I’m kind of hearing you talk about, and I love to get your feedback and kind of go deeper into is using KDP to build authority or to connect it to a already existing business model that isn’t just about being. Is that, is that a good sort of path to go? Cause I’m really curious about that, because that really changes the, my thinking
[00:09:22] Jason: around KDP.
[00:09:23] Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think so. I mean, I think that’s one of the benefits, you know, there’s like you stack benefits and so the first benefit. You’re helping people. So that’s, that’s important. Step number one, be helpful to someone on the planet with your writing or with your work. But you also get paid for it.
[00:09:41] And so there’s that benefit. And then you also, because of the book itself, you establish credibility and B and then fourth benefit because of the BSR rankings and category. You know, if you’re the number one book in internet marketing or the number one book in e-commerce. So the number one book in small business, you have implied authority.
[00:10:00] And you know, if I look at my books right now and I see that I’m outranking Michael Hyatt and Ryan Levesque and other people and other people see that that’s not my delusion. You know, it’s like, that’s not me saying, I, you know, somehow things are good. You know, in my mind, it’s my book is outranking their book at that moment in that platform, you know what you guys get my point.
[00:10:27] It is a verifiable you know, Social proof. And so there’s those benefits. So you just stack those benefits together and it ends up putting, you know, putting together a set of really complimentary you know, attributes for your business as you define it, you know, whether you’re an e-commerce seller with a specific product and your book is really, you know tied to that, or whether you want to be an authority in a certain topic.
[00:10:50] You know, you’ve got a lot of angles to go from, so yeah, of. I think it is broader than just you know, being a writer and selling one book or collection. Michael, what are you?
[00:11:00] Michael: I’m very curious to know more about how it can be added to an existing business, because it sounds like an incredibly sort of do you see very attempting business model and the way you’ve described it, Chris, even more than when you’ve talked about it in the past, I’m like, I really, really want to get into this.
[00:11:13] But on the other hand going in 10 directions at once is not normally correlated with success. So how do we add this onto an existing business, which has got physical products focus at the beginning.
[00:11:23] Jason: Yeah. I’d love to spend some time talking about that in Kyle.
[00:11:25] Chris: You’re exactly right. A lot of people see that.
[00:11:27] But I’m not an author. I’m not writing romance novels. And that’s where I want people to stop and think, okay. Books. Aren’t just like the Harry Potter, the Stephen King kind of thing. Books are journals and recipe books and coloring books and draw like, just anything that can be on paper. Yeah. It can be a book.
[00:11:45] It can be published through Katie P. Now we’re going to get a little specific here. If we’re going to talk about how sellers can use KDP. And I think this might be a good way to phrase it. A lot of people who are creative, a lot of people who write a lot of these Kindle books and these series, they’re not marked.
[00:11:58] So they put out all this content and they really have trouble selling their product. And then a lot of sellers aren’t creative. So they’re not thinking of like, oh, well, how can I, you know, create a print on demand product and how can I bundle it and market it and all these things. So you kind of have these two, two groups that aren’t, there’s not a lot of people that are the same being a creative and a seller.
[00:12:17] So I hope we can kind of bridge that gap and have the sellers who are listening to say, wait a minute. I see the potential here. I’m going to do what it takes to get the creativity, to make a product that will compliment my products. And then phase two, how do I use it? How do I market it? I’m explaining all of that today.
[00:12:34] But first Mike, I got a question for you, a call. I think you guys can both answer this question. How much would you guys pay as Amazon sellers, as people who work with clients, how much would you pay for an Amazon product? Prime eligible where every single time it sells, you’re going to get 12, 10 to $12 put into your bank account at the end of the month for all of the sales.
[00:12:56] And you don’t have to replenish, it’s automatically replenished for you. You don’t have to handle any customer returns. There’ll be zero customer contact. How much would you pay for this Amazon listing with $10 profit. And you don’t have to do anything other than promote it, tell people about it, right.
[00:13:14] How much would you pay for that?
[00:13:15] Kyle: As long as I make more than $10. I’m good to pay thousands probably of dollars. Fred’s worth thousands of dollars, potentially 20 to $30,000 at least. Right. I mean, it depends how much sales you got going through.
[00:13:27] Chris: Completely set up images, like the title, everything done for you professional in the Amazon search catalog.
[00:13:34] Michael: How much should we be making a day here? $10 profit per day for,
[00:13:39] Chris: for like $10 per unit per unit.
[00:13:43] Michael: We selling a day already as
[00:13:45] Chris: many as possible. There’s no
[00:13:48] Michael: cost. Yeah, it does put a smile on my face. I know importing from China.
[00:13:54] Chris: There’s no lead time. That’s, it’s one of those things. And I, I frequently say this when people say something’s too good to be true.
[00:14:02] It usually. That’s very true. It usually is, but it doesn’t say it always is. And in my opinion, KTP is one the. It’s too good to be true. And people need to really understand that and take some action. And I don’t really mean like, people need to rush this opportunity isn’t going away, but the opportunity is better now than it’s going to be 1, 2, 3 years from now.
[00:14:22] So people need to just kind of shift their mindset and be like, wait. This really is something that I should spend my time. That’s paid little attention to, and here we go. We’re going to get into the seller stuff. How can sellers use this? And let’s just pick a category, the exercise category, right?
[00:14:35] Someone sells stuff in the exercise. They’re, they’re selling like the stretch bands on the yoga pants, like anything around health and fitness and exercise. There’s a lot of sellers out there. They’re importing stuff. They’re private labeling it. They’re putting their own label on it and selling it. Well, what if.
[00:14:48] An exercise journal or a nutrition journal where someone could follow along and say, okay, on this day I ran this many miles. This was my time and all this stuff. And if I don’t know how to make a sheet like that, just Google it. Right. And then you can do it. You can remake a PDF and to make it your own or hire somebody to do these things.
[00:15:05] And now you’ve got a a hundred page. That someone can use every single month to track their exercise or track their nutrition. They can have tips that kind of links back to a Facebook community or, or discord if that’s what you want to build. And all of a sudden you’ve got a product that you can sell on Amazon.
[00:15:19] And when I’m talking about like journals and notebooks and stuff, that’s, that’s what I call low content books. I priced them around maybe 9 95, right? You’re going to make maybe four or $5 profit on those books, but now you have an Amazon product page at $10. And that book is going to cost you $2 as an author cost, which if you wanted to order your own copies at cost and now bundle them with your exercise products you have now.
[00:15:44] An exclusive Amazon listing with a new, with a new product page. It says, this includes this $10 product. Don’t believe me, go look at the link. It’s $10, but you can get it included in this book. For free. Now you’re making $2 less because of the additional costs, but you added so much more value. Hey, now you may get additional sales is going to make up for that or charge $5 more.
[00:16:04] And now you’re making more on that unit and you’re still making more. And the customer is still getting a $5 discount than if they bought them separately. Now that’s, if you bundled them together, have you guys seen virtual bundles? Are you kidding me? We love virtual bundles with KDP books. You don’t even have to order your author copies anymore.
[00:16:25] You can just do it all virtually. You could literally, this is the real sit on the beach in Jamaica business, where most of them like, yeah, you can kind of sit on the beach. You still got to go check your email and customer this and, and warranty that not with KDP. Like it’s just none of that. Creating a virtual bundle with your, your kitchen products with your recipe guides.
[00:16:47] That’s it, there are so many opportunities to say, look I’m
[00:16:52] Jason: Chris is the man. Chris is a man on fire. This is awesome. Okay. Let me just know. No, I know. Totally. Okay. If you, if you’re listening to this right now, That’s all the ideas already taken for those little journals or whatever. Look at it. You can’t see this, but I’m holding up on our stream are recording.
[00:17:11] This is a journal I bought at Barnes and noble. About a month ago. I, I carved into the front of the leather on it right better. And it’s my writer’s journal that I’m using to just take notes related to copywriting story creation. Everything. And if I could have, if I would have had this to purchase, I would have, but I had to make myself look how crappy it looks like I carved it with a knife and I use a Sharpie to make the cover say, write better.
[00:17:42] Kyle: I imagine wiggling that at
[00:17:44] Jason: the fire, I’m telling you guys, these things do not exist. Okay. Look, here’s another example. You guys re describe it. This is Brendon Burchard’s high performance planner. A lot of people have bought the. These are commercially available, a lot of places, Barnes and Nobles and big bookstores.
[00:17:59] But you know, this is a planner for people who are, you know, high performance stuff. So those types of journals, you can make those in any niche and industry. Okay. So let me do a couple of hot takes on ideas and then. Then we will kick it back to you, Chris, for some more ideas for creative, you know, marketing.
[00:18:17] One of the things that I think is insanely valuable with KTP is to to use it as a brand building you know, cross promotional tool. So, you know, for example, you’ve got a collection of books or a book on KDP and in the book, it points to your. Aspects of your content distribution. So for me, in particular, for example, I I launched like I’ve got five or six books under the, you know, power name Instagram power, YouTube marketing, power, Pinterest power.
[00:18:51] But when it came to teaching about Shopify, I didn’t feel like the book was the rightful. So, what I did was I publish it on you to me as a screen capture video based course. And in 2016, Udemy was relatively new and it blew up because I had built an audience for my Kindle book and my Kindle platform work.
[00:19:12] And then I cross promoted into. My course on Udemy. And I think we have 38,000 students now on you to me. And that course is installed itself as the kind of top shop a top Shopify course. The thing that you might not know about being an author on Amazon, that’s a total like just, they just give you something amazing is you can hook up your RSS.
[00:19:38] And in your author profile and every post that you make, including these shows that we do these podcasts, that RSS feeds from them stream into my author profile on Amazon, and they send you out bound traffic. Like everybody always like, oh, Hey, my Amazon won’t send traffic for you. If they do, they do for authors, you have a blog post I’m literally, if you go look at my author account on Amazon, I’m constantly streaming into, you know, my author account.
[00:20:08] And so, so I think this cross promotional element is there and is available. You just have to learn how to kind of rig it up. And it does allow you to create. Other things off Amazon completely legit, no big deal. They just make a blog post about your new thing. It streams right into Amazon author. And there you have it.
[00:20:27] And so that to me is hugely beneficial and valuable. So that’s my first hot take. Chris want to do another hot take and or any commentary on, on that whole idea of leveraging it for additional sales, different platforms? You
[00:20:40] Chris: know, I’m happy to talk KTP but I want to make sure Kyle and Michael have.
[00:20:44] I don’t have any questions on what we were talking about with the bundling or if their minds are just kind of like holy smokes. There’s a lot of opportunity here. So yes. Feel free to jump in if if I’m going too
[00:20:54] Jason: fast or confusing.
[00:20:55] Michael: What’s the, what’s the sort of next, I mean, it’s, my mind is kind of blown by the amount of opportunity and I love the fact there’s no physical products to move around the world, which is particularly now a really great thing.
[00:21:05] Give me another idea of how a physical product seller would use KDP. So I plug it into their business then
[00:21:11] Chris: if you’re a physical product, so you could, I would make a compliment. Type product that goes along with the physical products that you are selling.
[00:21:18] And if people have trouble kind of coming up with that, I would recommend they join some kind of group or mastermind to kind of just throw some ideas around. And there’s probably a lot of really simple low-hanging fruit ideas that it’s really haven’t thought of. They could probably go to their products and see what other people have bought.
[00:21:30] And if there’s a book in there they’d be like, holy smokes. I should make my own recipe book, my own journal, my own kind of planner, my own notebook that goes along with these things. Those types of books are very, very easy to make. And I don’t want people to overthink the other part of it. It’d be like, you can write an authority book and under a hundred pages, right?
[00:21:45] And by the time you do a title page and a blank page and ESPN page and a dedication page, another blank page, a table contents, it fills up pretty quick. Right. And we’re talking six by nine. Like it can be double-spaced so you can fill out. Fairly quickly. It doesn’t have to be, you know, 700 pages long. But I think there’s just, there’s a little bit of a block where people before they upload their first book, they really think this is going to be complicated.
[00:22:06] Jason, you confirm with me if you’ve had this experience, but when I work with people, when they finally get their first book uploaded, they’re like, that was really easy. And I was like, I told you, it was so easy for the beginning. It’s two files and interior file with what you see, what you get PDF and a cover file.
[00:22:24] That’s literally it, give it a title, give it a description, give it a price. And you’re available for sale at eight different worldwide marketplaces, but the physical product not.
[00:22:32] Jason: And let me just say this, let me say this in that regard, you know, when people have heard that I’ve published with McGraw hill three, three books, and then, you know, repeat with those.
[00:22:41] And then other D my wife has published with DK publishing people always wonder, like, how do you do the, how does, how to professional writers do this? Like Microsoft. Like wait, no, like the McGraw hill people that’s how do they get your Microsoft word? They all use Microsoft word, so it’s not complicated.
[00:23:00] It’s just, it’s not, it’s easier. People
[00:23:02] Chris: think I got two more takes. I think he has a really good, a love, and one is how to add more value. I’ll say massive value into a book because of you. You know, $10, 14, you know, $20 book. There’s only so much profit in there and you might be like, well, how much profit can I get out of a book?
[00:23:19] Like how expensive a book can you sell? And it used to be with CreateSpace. You could price your book at thousand dollars. And I wish I had done more of that back in the day of actually having a $3,000 book cause I could have sold it. It would have been awesome. But now. It’s $250 is the highest price that you can price your book in for a paperback book.
[00:23:37] And I believe it’s $99 for a Kindle, the digital version of a book. So you think of $250 for a book. How can you possibly sell a book for that kind of price? What on earth can be. It’s worth $250. Well, I’ll tell you, when I published online arbitrage in 2014, it hit the top 1000 hit number 8 85. I believe on Amazon best sellers list.
[00:23:59] And it was priced at $300 and be like, what, how on earth did you do that? It’s like, well, it’s a course. So Jason, I know you’ve met. On YouTube. If you take a course content and more matter what it is, and you put it into book format, and you put links to unlisted, exclusive video content or access to private member communities, or private one-on-one access to you as an expert or as a coach, then you can sell a book for a lot more.
[00:24:25] And all of a sudden, the only way to get a phone call with me, the only way to join my. It’s to buy this book. This is for everybody, that’s bought the $300 book for the $250 book. So you can add massive value. If you’re an artist or some kind of digital content creator, you can add downloads to your digital assets that people can reuse for commercial purposes on their book covers whatever it is, you can create things that you could only get by purchasing the book.
[00:24:47] And before anybody jumps and says, well, what if they just buy it and return it? I don’t care because Amazon’s KDP. Royalties are nonrefundable. If you return the book, I still get. Right. And I don’t say it as a, oh, do you want people to kind of go around the Bush on this thing, but it’s a sense of confidence.
[00:25:05] They go to Amazon is prime eligible. They know if it’s not good, they can return it. They trust the Amazon reviews instead of going to Jason miles.com and like, oh, I gotta return this. And I gotta like contact Jason and go through a hassle. And of course all the reviews on your website are perfect. Right.
[00:25:20] It’s everybody says you’re booking. It’s up for grabs. If your book is not good, you’re going to get one star reviews. If your book is good, you’re going to get five-star reviews so you can add massive value. And when I sold my $300 book, I was getting $150 wealthy every single time while I’m sitting back, like, I can’t believe this.
[00:25:36] This is working like, this is really like, this is amazing. This is perfect. And on top of that, Jason, how much do you love author Cox?
[00:25:45] Jason: Oh, yeah, there’s a whole system. No, no, no, no, come on man. This is, I know about it. I just haven’t used it wisely, but you used it wisely, but let me just say, you know, just one little, little bit about that when you did that the big price point for your book, dude, it was, it was a mixture of publicity stunt, but also genius.
[00:26:07] Content strategy and you made a lot of money, but you also got a lot of notoriety for that. Cause it was really, really other than what most people are used to. It’s very cool.
[00:26:20] Chris: Yeah, no one had done it before and really it hasn’t been utilized. It’s still very much a very attractive platform for. A course, and I would mirror the course on Udemy and give you if you buy the book, I’ll give you free access and all that kind of thing.
[00:26:34] But I, I frequently say that I’m an accidental. I just try a lot of things and sometimes they work and everybody forgets about the things that
[00:26:40] Jason: don’t work. Okay. So talk about author copies. Yeah. Author
[00:26:44] Chris: copies for Pete’s sakes. It is so good and it’s getting better and better. Of course you can order author copies, order a hundred copies of your own book and bring them to yourself.
[00:26:52] You can sell them yourself or send them out to people you can sell or ship them media mail. It’s very inexpensive. But my advice and I don’t see anybody doing this or teaching. This is to use author copies basically as. Because if I have a book that’s at the minimum, it’s like up to 108 pages. We $2 and 15 cents.
[00:27:11] It’s under $6 to deliver it in an Amazon package anywhere in the United States or Canada. Or the UK or Spain or Italy or Germany or France,
[00:27:25] Jason: but let’s define the term first. So an author copy is something you have access to when you publish a book on KDP that you get basically of super discounted price 0.4, and you can order them in bulk, like for yourself, like, Hey, I want a hundred copies at a low price point, but you can also to your point, Chris, like your hack that you’re describing you plug in a customer name and send them an author.
[00:27:51] That’s the system that you’re describing and
[00:27:53] Chris: the way this works. And I think a lot of Amazon sellers skip over this because they’re thinking, okay, if I’m doing online arbitrage, if I’m doing an Amazon flip, I can’t use my prime account. I need to pay for shipping. And like all these other details. Well, your author copies are not primary.
[00:28:07] So if you order a hundred copies to yourself and I’ve ordered like 200 copies, I just shipped them to an event. Like I don’t want to order them and bring them myself. I don’t just put it in the Colorado hotel address and they’ll just ship them there for the event. But you can take it all the way down to a single unit.
[00:28:20] Now, single unit for yourself, doesn’t make a lot of sense because now you’re paying $3 and 59 cents shipping, handling, packaging, all that the total fulfillment fee from Amazon. It doesn’t make sense for a single copies of yourself, but because this is Amazon, you guys know you can put an address in and.
[00:28:33] To somebody else say like, oh, I’ll send one book over here. I’ll send a gift, I’ll send these headphones, I’ll send this, whatever. I’ll just send it as a gift to somebody. And if you’re doing a gift one-off like on, on some prime, they don’t really care about that. But you certainly can’t scale a, build a business and send out a thousand copies this way.
[00:28:48] But I’ve so I’ve sent out over 1700 copies of my online arbitrage book one at a time to 1700 different people all over the. Without leaving my house without packing a single box with it’s I, this is why I get excited about it. Cause it’s just so amazing. And there’s so many opportunities to do so many things without having to invest in a warehouse and inventory and storage and fulfillment and all these things, all that stuff is covered and they just find the adaptation.
[00:29:19] Canada is now back on the author copy list. They weren’t there for a long time because of fulfillment issues, but now you can send to, to Canada and Michael, I just did this last week sent a copy to a UK address. Right. You know what? It would cost me to order it my own book, get it here, put it in a package way.
[00:29:35] It send it to the UK with a customs form. Forget how much it’s going to cost. How long is that going to take? Now I can do it in 36. Right. And you’re going to get it in two days within an Amazon envelope, which I think is another thing that I don’t mean to over hype. This Amazon envelopes get opened, right?
[00:29:52] They don’t get lost, they get delivered and they get opened instead of like, oh, media mail. I’m not interested. Like, can you imagine the way the networking opportunities, if you want to drop ship your own book or something like to a potential client, like here’s a gift, my hundred dollar book that I’m sending you, which is going to cost you.
[00:30:10] $8 to give away because of the margin I get, because I’m the author and I get like it printed price. It’s crazy. We could do a whole other show about leveraging the margin of your KT people, books for networking. And, oh my gosh. It’s so good.
[00:30:28] Jason: We could also do a whole other show and I don’t even want to say the phrase because it’s, it needs to be its own show.
[00:30:33] But as soon as you layer in audible and the ability to audio book. As companions to your paper back in your Kindle, you’ve got a whole nother layer of opportunity there, but again, that’s a whole different show because that that’s a fun topic in and of itself. Okay. So let’s bring this plane home to the ground, Kyle and Michael, other thoughts, comments, questions help us out here.
[00:30:58] Kyle: I do have one question and. Based on my experience as an Amazon seller. When you launch a new product on Amazon, you often run into a cold start problem. Like you don’t have reviews, you don’t have visibility and you’re basically buried in the organic search results. Do you have some tips around that for if you wanted to launch a Katie?
[00:31:21] Because I mean, the worst thing to do is you open up your KDP account. You get your books that there, you put it out there and then crickets, right? So what would be some help to sort of get that off the
[00:31:30] Jason: ground? Let me, let me do one, Chris, and then you do one, we might have different things that may might be saying the same thing, but same idea might come to mind here.
[00:31:38] What I did initially, when I did that Pinterest power book with McGraw hill is one. Tweaked to KDP is you have total discretion on the pricing. And so, and Chris has talked about the high end of the pricing, which is rarefied air. No one ever usually goes there except Mr. Chris cranky. But but you also have discretion on the low end of the price point.
[00:32:01] And so what you can do with your self published books is make them free five days. Every 90 days, I believe is the rhythm you can do for your Kindle book and what I did. When I launched that Pinterest power book was, I just started making my other books. Like for five days or I do three days and then a couple of weeks later do two more days.
[00:32:20] And those free putting on the free skyrockets downloads and visibility. But because I really wanted to promote the Pinterest power book to demonstrate that I could do marketing for the McGraw-Hill people, because I wanted to prove that, you know, I could do it. And so that use of force. In combo with the other items that you have on there that are paid is a genius way.
[00:32:41] I think with self-publishing to get around that cold start problem and be just buried in the back end of the Amazon catalog where no one sees you. And so you can play with that idea of free and then paid. And that, that price point thing is, is really vital. I think. So Chris, other thoughts beyond that one?
[00:32:58] I don’t know if that came to your mind as well, but
[00:33:00] Chris: definitely. And you get that option when you’re in the Kindle select program and you can definitely leverage that and free we’ll bump you up. There’s websites out there to just list every single Kindle book that is free that day. And everybody goes and downloads it.
[00:33:11] I want to give kind of, there’s two different ways that I would launch this one being the Kindle and one being the paperback. And I was going to be on one single Amazon product page. And you can do them at the same time. And I, I really don’t see how this would fail. This would actually work amazingly well.
[00:33:24] If you price your Kindle book and 99 cents, then. You could purchase and I would purchase like a minimum of 100 copies. So this is a fairly new thing on Amazon’s retail side, to be able to purchase Kindle products for other people. So now you have a hundred. If you buy a hundred copies, you’re going to have 100 individual unique links that you can then give away.
[00:33:44] And as people redeem those, it’s going to count as a sale and all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom. You’re going to get 80% of the people redeem. You get 80 sales, it costs you 80 bucks. That’s the best 80 bucks that you’re going to spend. Alternately. If you have any type of email list, you could put 100 emails in there.
[00:34:01] And 100 people are going to get an email from Amazon saying, Hey, Kyle just bought you this book, click here to redeem. And all of a sudden, hopefully 80% of those people will redeem and you’re gonna get 80 sales. And again, they’re getting an Amazon email much more likely to be opened, not ended up in those spam or the social media.
[00:34:17] You know, folder on Gmail. And now you’re getting sales on your book and then people are like, Hey, this is a really good book. I want the paper bag. I don’t know how many times people buy the Kindle. They come back, they want to buy the paper. I’ve done that. I listened to an audible book and I go and buy the paperback because I don’t want to take notes.
[00:34:29] I want an already printed out for me. So if people have the Kindle, it doesn’t mean they’re not gonna buy the paperback. They’re going to do that as well. Now, if you don’t have a list, I would say, okay, fine. Who has, you know, your target audience that is their audience and say, Hey, I would love, I just published a book.
[00:34:43] I’d love to send you a free paperback copy or get a special edition. You know, if you want to do to really butter someone up and say, Hey, I would love to give away 200 copies to your audience. You know, just send me 200 emails and I will send them my, my Kindle book absolutely free. A lot of people are gonna say, yeah, that’s like a really good deal.
[00:34:58] Like, I don’t know why I wouldn’t do that. Take advantage of that. As for paperbacks, you can do the exact same thing. You can say, look, I want to give away a hundred copies of my book, absolutely free Ali to pay the shipping. Now it’s going to cost you $6 a unit to send these things out. So think about that in terms of your marketing budget.
[00:35:14] And of course you could do eight, eight AMS ads. You can target individual. I don’t know if you can do this on any of the other platforms so you can target individual acents. You could just say, Hey, this is my, you know, what’s the number one keyword. What’s the top seller in your specific. Take those top 10 search results and say, I want to advertise on these 10 pages and these 10 pages only again, there are so many ways to get the word out.
[00:35:38] Now, some of the things I talked about cost a little bit of money, but we’re talking a little bit of money, right? We’re not talking about, about spending thousands of dollars. And this is where it comes back to, you know, the hardest part of this is getting people to care about your book, know and care about it.
[00:35:52] That’s the hard part. So spend that either spend money or spend. If you don’t have money or time, then I don’t know how anybody got a book published in the first place, but either have money or time and you can spend your time interacting on social media, helping people you know, answer your questions around the topic that your book is is about.
[00:36:08] And they’re gonna be like, wow, this guy’s really helpful. He has a book. Totally. I’m gonna buy this so you can start building your own audience. If you don’t have any type of audience already. I don’t know, Michael, this might be a chance for you to jump in because I don’t think there’s a great. To contact existing Amazon customers to even give them something that’s probably against some level of terms of service.
[00:36:27] I would
[00:36:28] Michael: say some in Kyle, you may know more about that than me these days. I don’t try and push that envelope too much these days because Amazon tends to frown on it.
[00:36:34] Kyle: I wouldn’t push that too far
[00:36:36] Jason: myself. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one final comment here from me and then let’s just do a concluding thought or comment and to close the show.
[00:36:43] The work doesn’t have to be your own for you to be the publisher of the book on KDP. I’m looking right now in bestseller ranks and as it happens in the sellers in auctions and small business, number 18 right now is become an Amazon selling legend using retail arbitrage by Danny stock. That book is colonized book that Danny wrote and we bought from.
[00:37:07] And we published it and it’s currently number 18 and it’s got amazing reviews and Danny was just a terrific author. And so it’s technically ours and it’s our lead gen tool for our business. And so you don’t have to be the originator of the content to be the marketer of the content. So use your skillsets wisely, build a team and think through how you can use a platform.
[00:37:29] So that’s my final comment. Let’s go around the horn horn, Kyle Michael, and then Chris you can wrap it up. This
[00:37:34] Kyle: is, this is eyeopening material. Thanks for sharing you guys. I think that it really can, you can bolt this literally on to almost any business model, which is really cool. The other thing I wanted to, to mention, because it was sort of rattling around in my head when you’re talking about a higher priced Kindle book is if you’re in a competing space, right.
[00:37:52] And you have a book. Say $50 or a hundred dollars. And you’re competing in some book that’s selling for $9 or 9 99 or whatever, and you want it to spend advertising money. You’re going to win in that market because if the book is converting and you have the social proof on it, right. And people are buying.
[00:38:13] You’re going to be able to spend way more money to get higher visibility and acquire more sales than the book that’s selling for 9 99. It just, that’s just the math of it. Right. And that’s how you can start to win in sort of establish market. Authority is by being able to spend more, to get visibility and acquire those customers.
[00:38:32] So I think that’s a pretty interesting point when you, when you’re dealing with an ad platform like Amazon,
[00:38:36] Michael: The, the main thing, main thing that strikes me is this, I mean, first of all, I’m really, really excited personally about this. I know quite a lot of people that are probably better suited to being creative types than marketers. So in a lot of ways, a lot of people I’ve worked with the private label business creation.
[00:38:50] Might well, be better suited to creating a Kindle book. Although the marketing side, they might want to team up with somebody else. What strikes me is that if we’re used to ordering products from China that need physically creating and then going through lots of iterations and then always needs to be airfreighted back across the globe.
[00:39:04] In my experience to do that, we’re not really dealing with a very different process. If you’re getting somebody else to create work for you. And I guess if you, if you’re a native English speaker, which many people listening will be or good at English. The, the idea of proofreading is probably gonna be less scary than trying to test whether something is consumable.
[00:39:20] It’s going to kill children or small animals. If it’s a consumable product. And many of us are quite comfortable somehow weirdly with, with going to that level of difficulty. So it strikes me that the. Th the sourcing process is just actually going to be less painful. Even if you outsource it. That’s the opportunity that strikes me for the people whose skill set.
[00:39:37] I know as marketers and sourcing people.
[00:39:40] Chris: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And even just the insurance thing, you just touched on, you know, the insurance can scare people away. Like, oh my gosh, what if someone chokes on a small product, it’s just a book. You don’t need private insurance. You don’t need the freight.
[00:39:52] I almost think I didn’t emphasize it enough at the beginning. They’re like, this is a completely free. Platform, there are no costs involved unless you start buying your own books or spending ad dollars. Obviously, if you can get a product on Amazon, physical prime eligible, trusted reviews, free returns, all these things All you gotta do is spend, spend the time to create the interior file and the exterior file.
[00:40:13] And I, I heard this tip. It was actually on that that Collin show that you recommended Jason, where it’s just something so simple that I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. If someone’s like an expert, it. And, you know, you know, they just, if they had a conversation with them, you get all the information you needed.
[00:40:27] It can be hard for them to turn that into like the written word kind of thing. It’s only said just hire someone on fiber and just like, get on zoom and just talk for an hour and tell the Fiverr guy to turn into a chapter. I was like, that’s so easy. I should have done that. Like a long time ago. It’s so simple.
[00:40:41] And just being a published author, if you can think back 10, 15 years, if you were on Amazon, but you weren’t in Barnes and noble people. Oh, you’re not, you’re not a real. Right. Real authors are Barnes and noble. If you’re not on Amazon, you’re not a real author. Real authors are now on names. The times have changed.
[00:40:58] And I know we’ve thrown a lot of stuff out there and some of it’s gonna sound kind of complicated. So if people have questions, you know, like, like messaged the show or something. But I don’t want people to sleep on this opportunity, just not because it’s going to go away, but because you’re just going to kick yourself if three years from now, you’re like, oh, for pizza should have this three years ago.
[00:41:15] Like, yeah, you’re absolutely right. But you know, we’ll be glad they get in whenever they get it. But it’s yeah. It’s
[00:41:20] Jason: something that. Man, this show is never going to stop. I have to tell this one little story before I wrap, wrap. What you just said was interview people. I was at an event and heard the author of the shack, his name’s William Paul Young.
[00:41:33] And he spoke and afterwards he was just out, you know, shaking people’s hands. And I said, Hey, I’m an author too, you know you know, business related books. And could, could I possibly even interview for my, you for my book? And it was like, yeah, that’s cool. Just email me. I just went back and forth with him, ask him like, you know, 10 questions, and then there you go.
[00:41:54] I had the author of one of the biggest books. If you’re not familiar with it, that book has sold something like over 20 or 25 million copies or some crazy thing it’s on Wikipedia is like one of the best selling books of all time. It was his content. I was able to include in my book because I just asked him, Hey, would you mind if I, you know, interview you for my book?
[00:42:14] And so you could do that anytime you’re rubbing elbows with anybody, who’s interesting. Reach out to people on your podcast or whatever. You can always take what they give you. And, and with their permission, put it into your book as a, as an interview. Okay. So man, we could go on and on this is going to be like a whole multi-day workshop on self publish.
[00:42:32] You know, we’ve talked about doing that before Chris, that we’ve never done it. So this is the 43 minutes. I want to thank everybody for listening today for this extended long hot take session on self publishing with KDP and hope you got a ton of value out of it. As always gentlemen, thank you so much for your hot takes on the topics.
[00:42:49] This has just been fantastic and appreciate your time and effort in this work together.
[00:42:54] Kyle: Thanks everyone. Great stuff guys.
[00:42:56] Chris: Thanks.
[00:42:57]