Anyone here write Kindle books? How do you pick your niche and how do you promote your book? Do you use the FREE kindle book feature?
A teacher from my university published three of his short novels as ebooks for the Kindle. As far as he told me, he made a deal with a small publishing company that did all the promotion for him. Since the books weren't amazing he didn't make too much money. Everybody does the same basic type of promotion. This includes sharing information about the book on social networks, trying to get a buzz around it on goodreads, getting people to review the books in sites where community is important, etc. He ended up making some money off of the books, even though they were quite cheap. I'm not sure what you mean by "niche" though. Are you asking if there's a genre to write in that would sell more books, or are you asking how to classify your ebook once you're adding it to the store? The first question doesn't have an answer, because there's no way of knowing what genre is going to be popular. Books about vampires probably sell well right now.
Free is a funny thing, when you use it the perceived value drops off a cliff, and at the same time the amount of downloads will be much higher. If you can learn to offset the decrease in perceived value, you can use Kindle books as of valuable lead generation tool.
The free kdp promo is a must but you also need to promote the book with reviews paid and free and also promote through free book promo sites and social networks before you do KDP free days and also you can use book bub if your serious (but cost money) and really get the book out there and also try to build a list interested on the niche your wanting to use and promote the book in advance to the list and also get a facebook fan page and run 5-10 dollars to your page and put some posts up about your book launch before it happens and then the post that does the best, you can promote and boost it with paid FB post advertising with your link to the book on it and also you can do twitter tweet for a book download as their is a program that you can use to do that i think its called "book for a tweet" or something like that.
I'm doing really well with children's books right now. The marketing aspect never ends, and it's a numbers game both in the books you output and the need for more sales to drive better ratings on Amazon. If you're looking to hit it rich and think this is the way, then you're better off looking elsewhere. You have to enjoy creating and marketing your products constantly in order to stay in the game. There's nothing "set it and forget it" about the Amazon game, that's for sure.
My sales figures are low, I tend to make on average about 5 sales a week, although one book sells more than that in the UK. I have 3 books on Kindle so far. Most of the people who've been there a while have a lot of books a) because it makes them more visible and b)the chance of selling at least some.
Actually, I disagree with what you said. From my own personal experience, giving out a Kindle eBook for free gets you more and more downloads, which results in a number of reviews, and that shoots you to the first page of Kindle store in turn. The trick is to give out a first few issues for free. Then charge on!
Here are a few links about picking a profitable niche: http://www.betterbooktools.com/how-to-find-profitable-amazon-niches-and-kindle-categories/ http://www.epicpassiveincome.com/how-to-find-profitable-kindle-niches/ http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...-publish-books-post-get-reviews-scale-up.html And a video: Good luck!
The whole free idea is best used to build your list. At the beginning of the the book, thank your purchasers ( even though it is free) and give them a link for a free item/ report/whatever that they can get by clicking which brings them to your opt- in page. Works well. I hope this Helps.
I know I'm contributing to an old discussion, but I really want to share my story with y'all if that's OK. If there's one online income source I like talking about most, it's definitely self-publishing on Amazon. I'm normally a pretty modest guy but I've gotta say… I rock at self-publishing! I've increased my monthly income from nothing to nearly $2K in less than three years just from selling books on Amazon... and I was making a grand a month within a year. The post on how I make money self-publishing has been one of the most popular on my personal blog so I wanted to update it with everything I've learned over the last few years. I've included updates on how to turn your books into a passive source of income and how to make the whole process easier. Ok, so $2K a month isn't huge money but it's getting there and it's growing very quickly. If you want to learn more about making money with Kindle then check out "KindleBucks.com" which is the #1 Amazon Kindle Training out there. I can't recommend it enough. That's how I got started almost three years ago. Sweely