I know you don’t like your job. At best, you enjoy it from time to time. But if you’re like most Americans, you flat out dislike your job. In fact, a significant percentage of people flat out hate their job.
I can relate. One of my friends used to work a 9 to 5 job and he said me, “it sucks. It pays well, but I feel like my soul is being sucked out of me every single time I show up to work.”
Thankfully, I discovered how to create online passive income systems before I get a job.
Passive income is the opposite of a regular 9 to 5 job. When you work a regular job, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. No work, no pay. If you don’t show up, you don't get paid.
With passive income, you work once, but you earn many times from what you produced with your work.
Think of it like publishing a book. You sit down to write a book, and you work once to produce that book. But your book can sell thousands, if not millions of copies.
Every time it sells, you earn money. You didn’t work actively for that money, but your book continues to produce revenue. The same applies to movies, songs, software, and you name it.
In this article, I’m going to teach you how to create money while you sleep using Amazon Kindle Publishing.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Create a Kindle account
Go to amazon.com and create an account.
Step 2: Sign up for Amazon Kindle Publishing
Sign up to Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing program. Fill out the form and get approved.
Step 3: Look through the Amazon Kindle categories
Casually browse through different topic categories on the Amazon Kindle store. Can you find categories that you’re interested in?
Maybe you’re into self-help, self-improvement, spiritual topics, or maybe you’re into science-fiction or fantasy. Pick a shortlist of topics you’re personally excited about.
Step 4: Find subcategories that have a high enough demand
Click through the different topics you’re interested in. Eventually, you’ll find bestselling books in each of these categories. Look at the sales page of these books.
Step 5: Look for books that have a sales rank of 10,000 or lower
As you go from category to category on Amazon Kindle, you’ll come across many different books. Always look at their sales page.
Take note of books that have a sales rank of 10,000 or less. A sales rank of 10,000 means that this book sells $10,000 every single year on average.
Just get a list of all the books and their titles, as well as their categories and their sales rank. Put this in an Excel sheet.
Step 6: Go through your Excel sheet and pick out topic categories you like the most
Go through your Excel sheet of top-selling books. Pick out the books that appeal to you the most. In other words, you are selecting the category that that book is in. Create a shortlist of five “hot” categories.
Step 7: Investigate your shortlist of hot categories further
Once you have your list reduced to five hot categories, look up the top ten books in those categories. See if the number one bestseller and the top ten bestsellers are all ranked at least in the 10,000 range. If the category doesn’t feature such books, eliminate that topic category from your list.
Step 8: Select your final target category
At this point, you should have a very short list of topic categories. These are topics that you’re personally passionate about. These also feature books that have bestsellers in the top ten that are at least in the 10,000 range.
This means that when you publish a book on this topic, it has enough demand. This also means that if your book enters the top ten, you’ll make at least $10,000 off that book for one year.
Step 9: Take note of the top 20 books in your target category
Study the sales pages and covers of the top 20 books in your category. Pay close attention to the following:
Step 10: Reverse engineer the books in your target category
Step 11: Create a reverse-engineered outline
Your book must preserve what bestselling books in your topic already talk about. This gives you a place to start. But your book must also deliver something they failed to produce.
Read the negative reviews of your competitors. What common theme comes up again and again? Make sure you cover those or try to fix those in your own book.
Step 12: Create the right outline for your book
Your outline must contain all the strong points of your competitors while also fixing their weak spots. You can do this by paying close attention to the negative reviews of your competitors and making sure your book doesn’t make the same mistake. Include these points in the outline.
Step 13: Decide whether to write your own book or outsource it
If you have the time, skill and attention to detail, go ahead and write your book. You need to set a firm deadline for your book or you might not be able to finish it.
Alternatively, you can hire a ghostwriter for your book.
There are lots of talented, experienced American ghostwriters who don’t charge a whole lot of money.
Regardless of who you go with, make sure both of you’re clear as to the terms of production for your book.
Step 14: Proofread your book
Whether you wrote your book or you had it ghostwritten by somebody else, you have to be responsible for the final form of your book. This means you have to proofread it yourself.
Read everything. Go line by line. Make sure that before you put your name on the book, you approve of everything that goes into your book.
Step 15: Reverse engineer your competitor’ covers
Review the notes that you’ve taken about your competitors’ covers and come up with a composite that captures the essence of all your competitors. Outsource this to a graphic designer at Fiverr. If you have the graphic design skills, do this yourself.
Step 16: Pick the right keywords and upload to Kindle
Now that you have taken extensive notes of your competitors’ sales pages, come up with the keywords that they all share. Tag your Kindle book with these keywords.
Step 17: Get your Kindle book formatted and uploaded
Go to Fiverr and find experienced format specialists who can convert your book’s DOC file into .epub or .mobi.
Once you’ve got the conversion along with the cover and the table of contents, upload these to Kindle. Make sure you tag and categorize your book based on your reverse engineering notes.
Step 18: Join free book giveaway groups on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms
There are lots of groups and areas where authors give away free copies of their books. Join as many of these places as possible and engage with other authors.
Create goodwill. Promote their books so you can earn brownie points with them.
Step 19: Set up your KDP free book promo day
Set up a free book promotion on Kindle. In this range of days, Amazon Kindle will give away your book absolutely free. People only need to load your Amazon Kindle URL to load your book and see that it’s free. They can then download.
Step 20: Promote your free kindle book to the lists you’ve joined
Share the link of your Kindle book URL to all the groups, pages, hashtags, and other social media areas that you’ve joined. Get people to share your Kindle book link with as many people as possible.
Step 21: Run as many promos as you can to increase your reviews
Don’t expect too many downloads the first time around. Get active on all the social media areas you’re in so that the next time you run your free book promo, more people would download.
The key is to understand that a certain percentage of people who download your book will end up writing a review for it.
Step 22: Get enough reviews and sell your book passively
Once your book gets enough reviews due to the free download promos you run, your book will start selling itself on Amazon, pretty much on autopilot. If you did your homework correctly, this can translate to quite a number of sales.
Remember, if you targeted topic categories where the top 20 books average in the 10,000 sales rank, this means your book can passively generate $10,000 in a year.
Step 23: Create more books to scale up your success
Fine-tune the steps above until you can make it work on autopilot.
Once you’re able to produce the results you’re looking for, create more books. This means that for every book you sell on Amazon, you get $10,000 for the year.
Amazon Kindle’s self-publishing system is a very powerful way of generating passive income. There are Kindle authors who make six to seven figures every single year, verified, just by publishing a book and doing nothing else. If you’re looking for passive income, this is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to do it.
Leave a Reply