You’re an expert in your subject, and now it is time for you to Selling Nonfiction eBooks on Amazon. You can use your eBook or audiobook to drive more business for your main income stream while generating additional income on the side. Publishing a nonfiction book can establish you as a thought leader and generate leads for your business.
Audiobooks and eBooks provide you with a fantastic way to create an educational experience for customers or prospects. Both provide you an opportunity to share in-depth training, guidance, and education. You can really dive into a topic you may have only delivered in smaller bites in blog posts, podcasts, and social media. You can even expand your income by offering online courses connected to your eBook.
The truth of the matter is that there has never been a time that’s been better or easier than now to create and sell your eBook in the market. However, you may have specific questions regarding the overall cost of publishing your eBook and whether you can afford that. To help you out, we are going to be sharing some of the best tips for selling Nonfiction eBooks on Amazon and making money.
1. Research Before Selecting Your Book Topic
As an expert, it’s easy to get excited about writing your knowledge and selling Nonfiction eBooks on Amazon. Even though you may have precise knowledge in a field, you may want to rethink writing on a topic that is too specific. After all, books on specialty subjects may not be searched for and purchased as often through Kindle. In order to set yourself up for success to reach the largest audience possible, make sure you’re writing content in a broad enough niche. Finding a way to generalize your content to apply to more people will help your downloads and, therefore, your income in the long-term.
An effective way to measure whether the niche is broad enough is to search a similar title on Amazon and check its ranking on the Amazon Best Sellers list. This little number will tell you where the book ranks in terms of sales. As a good rule of thumb, if the book ranks under #10,000 in the millions of books available on Amazon, it means there’s good potential traffic on the subject for you to capitalize on.
2. Research the Most Searched Amazon Book Keywords
A good practice when planning your self-publishing strategy is to research keywords surrounding your topic. There are tools such as Moz Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and more that will offer you lists of keywords and phrases around your topic that generate the most search traffic on the web. You should also dig into Amazon keywords with tools such as Keyword Tool and KDspy.
Setting your keywords in your product description, product keywords, and tags will help your digital content rank higher. The higher your product ranks, the more likely it is not only to be downloaded but to get into the hands of those people who are actively looking for it.
You need to remember that happy customers who gained something useful from reading your content will be the best marketing evangelists you can get. They’re far more likely to leave positive reviews and recommend your book to their friends, family, or colleagues who have a similar need.
3. Hire a Professional Graphic Designer for Your eBook Cover
Before you can count on getting countless downloads, higher rankings, and happy customers, you will need to reel them in. To do this, you need to perfect your book marketing strategy. Almost everyone has heard the phrase, “don’t judge a book by its cover.” The reason this saying is so popular is that that’s exactly what people do; they judge books by their covers.
As potential readers or listeners scroll through the list of offerings, looking for their next read, the first thing to catch their eye is the cover. Bland, boring, blank, or worse, obviously amateur covers will tell those people are scrolling that the contents of the book are probably similar. On the other hand, if your cover is bright, colorful, and attractive, it will catch the eye and hopefully inspire click-through. If you had to make just one marketing decision about your digital product, make it investing in a graphic designer to design a quality cover for your eBook.
4. Spend Time Writing Your eBook Title and Subtitle
As we mentioned above, the first thing that catches the reader’s eye is the book cover. The second thing the eye will gravitate towards is your eBook title. You will really want to spend a little extra time making sure your book title and subtitle are catchy, engaging and give some hint as to what your book is about. If you’ve ever worked in dynamic sales and marketing or mounted your own email campaigns, you’re probably already familiar with this concept. After all, a catchy and engaging email subject line often determines whether your email is opened or sent to the recycle bin.
Like that email subject line, your title will make or break whether the potential reader clicks to find out more about your content. Even if you have the best cover art in the world, a title that falls flat is far more likely to be skipped over than one that interests the reader. To craft a title that appeals to potential readers, keep it short, sweet, and engaging. If the title needs a bit more specification, you can elaborate on the topic of the book a bit more in the subtitle. Don’t use long, complicated words if you can help it.
If you’re unsure whether your title or subject line is engaging enough, test it out on a sample set. Rather than using your aunt or your best friend, ask colleagues or influencers who won’t be afraid to hurt your feelings. Test out a few titles and subtitles, tweak them after receiving feedback and then test again. It’s better to spend a lot of time testing and tweaking your title than spending time wondering why no one is downloading your material.
5. Write an Amazon Book Description that Sells
Sometimes, sellers are often so excited to finally list their product on Amazon that they don’t spend the time on the book description that they should. They think that a stellar title and a gorgeous book cover might generate sales all by themselves, and that’s entirely possible. However, a quality book description will seal the deal for consumers who are on the fence.
Think of it this way. Your book cover is the hook that draws in the reader. The title helps sell the deal, that this content might be something that could benefit them by teaching them something new or interesting. The book description will confirm that and ultimately close the sale or convince the reader they should pass. By the time potential readers reach the book description, they’re halfway sold on your book. Invest a little extra time telling readers why your content is just the thing to teach, answer, or address their want, and they will download in a snap.
6. To Make Money Selling Nonfiction eBooks on Amazon Run Free Promotions!
As Amazon is the big beast in the marketplace, you might want to sell your book exclusively on Amazon Kindle. One of the big benefits is that you can enroll your book in KDP Select. This is a rolling 90-day program where you commit to selling your digital version of a book ONLY on Amazon. In return, Amazon provides high royalty rates and promotional opportunities.
Whenever your book is enrolled in KDP Select, you have the opportunity to run either Kindle Countdown Deals or Free Book Promotions. You may run these promotions for five days during your 90-day enrollment period.
While you may be tempted to run Countdown Deals, you will get more readers if you start with Free Book Promotions. This is especially true if you are a first-time author. Offering your book for free enables readers to discover you without any financial risk on their part.
Amazon does help promote your free book in various ways, but Amazon’s efforts alone are NOT enough. You should concurrently run other types of advertisements to drive people to your free book during its promotional period. The most common types of advertisements are Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads. While both platforms take a bit of effort to learn, boosting a post from your Facebook Page (not your personal profile) is fairly easy to do.
To get the biggest bang for your buck, you need to promote your book with book promotion companies, such as Best Book Monkey. Book promotion companies maintain large email lists of interested readers. The relatively small amount of money that you invest in a book promotion will offer result in a surprisingly large number of downloads. Additionally, the concentrated period of time may boost your book higher in the Amazon ratings for your keywords, resulting in a snowball effect of more downloads.
Most authors find that after running a free book promotion they have more paid sales of their book in the days following the promotion. If you’re ready to run a promotion, be sure to review Best Book Monkey’s Book Promotion Packages.
7. Market Your eBook on Facebook and LinkedIn Groups and Blogs
As we mentioned above, hundreds of groups and sites regularly publish lists of free eBooks from around the web. As soon as your book is published, send an email to notify these sites that your brand new eBook has been listed for free. Every site that lists a link to your eBook generates more potential downloads and a wider audience. Also, consider promoting your book on LinkedIn and Facebook or to relevant blogs or groups that revolve around the topic you wrote about.
Boosting the traffic and buzz around your book early on will keep its momentum strong and open you up to wider audiences to continue generating passive income. If you decide to write a follow-up book, you can market to these same circles upon its release. If they liked your content the first time around, they are likely to read your new works as well. Finally, consider leveraging industry connections to help your content gain more exposure. Ask blog owners and websites that discuss similar topics if they would consider posting an excerpt of your eBook or a short write-up about your audiobook. Before you know it, you’ll be an expert in selling Nonfiction eBooks on Amazon.
