You see, there are these people who claim to have "proven systems" for getting a Kindle bestseller. And they sell courses, for quite a lot of money, on how you can do it too.
One thing that bothers me is that if you have a successful recipe for making money, why not just repeat it (like they claim you can do). Why sell courses? If you really out of the goodness of your heart want to share the recipe for success with other people, and you believe it will not diminish your own sucess, why not just give it away? Why insist that there are secrets which only become available it you pay? Unless you would make more money selling courses than selling books.
One of them shared his numbers. He had some 150 books under various pen names on different subjects. They were written by contractors from Odesk and Elancer, where he also found the cover designers. The reviews came from people on Fiverr. All he had to do was research the topics tor the books and their content, manage the outsourcing, and publish the result. So far, he is actually doing the exact same thing as any publisher has always done, except in those days we did not have Google Adwords to tell us how large the intended audience would be.
Then he told how much he was making. And this is the scary part. He had 150 books in the pipeline, he charged around 6 dollars (claiming the best performing price was $5:97) for each, and he made 2100 dollars per month. He was also really proud of having a mailing list of 3000 people. And he had been doing this for several years.
When I was a publisher, we would have missed these numbers in the general din of things. Add two zeroes (except to the price) and they would become worth-while. But if he is not making more money, I understand if he is trying to sell courses.
The intetesting thing is that the people who do this are really agressive at testing. This means they can provide some rather interesting numbers. And that it becomes easy to calculate what you get per hour. For starters, he has to have at least four reviews for the book to get sales. You can buy those reviews at Fiverr, which means it costs you 20 dollars per book. Then someone has to design the cover, which may cost another 20 dollars if it is to look really good. And he outsourced the writing, which put him back another 100 dollars. If someone does the formating for Amazon that will perhaps cost another 10 dollars But that means the external cost for the book is around 150 dollars.
An error people frequently make at this point is to say "wow, a book for 150 dollars!" when there are two other big costs: the project management, and the research.
The philosophy that these people advocate is that you should write books about subjects that people are looking for. It used to be that as a writer, you had no clue what readers wanted. If they wanted to communicate with you, they had to write a letter to you care of the publisher, and most people do not bother to do that. When the Internet became commonplace, they could send you an email. But now we have entered the age of Big Data, and suddenly there is much more information available, both about individual users but particularly, and importantly here, about users as a group. All Google searches no longer just give a URL, the sesrcher clicking on a link is redirected to Google, who either serves the requested page from their caches, or redirect the user to the source (after refreshing their caches). Yes, Google is ingesting the entire internet. Yes, they have log files of everything everyone does. They do not give them out (other than to the NSA). But they can slice the data many ways, and one of them is through the "Keyword Planner" tool.
For a company whose motto at some level still is "do no evil", Google is engaged in massive hypocricy. They sell their users - or at least their attention. Google makes their living by placing advertisements on web pages and in videos. These ads are tailored to the content of the pages, so they at least become somewhat relevant. This increases the rate at which people consume these ads. Not by much over the static ads that would be the alternative, but sufficiently for advertisers to select using Google. The company is built on large numbers - most ads are clicked less than one millionth of their views. But this is sufficient for Google to make enormous amounts of money, since they place millions, if not billions, of ads every day.
They do not need much of a sales force either. Customers make their bookings online, and do not have to talk to a sales person to place their ad. Which is what the keyword planner tool really is about.
The intent is to give the people who are thinking about where to advertise the best locations for their money - by allowing them to have an auction when there are many people searching, and there are few sites serving the searches.
The keyword planner tool provides one (for this discussion) important data point. There are many other things about searching in Google that many other people have written volumes about, so ley us focus on the important data point you can derive from the Keyword Planner tool. It tells you how many people have searched for a specific combination of keywords during a certain time period. A month, in the default setting. You can easily find out that the number of people searching for Justin Bieber approaches infinity, but those who search for "Swedish key fiddle tango" are preciously few. The Swedish key fiddle, by the way, is a sorely underappreciated instrument, and creative young people like Nyckelharpsorkestern are doing great things with it.
So the Kindle course marketers have tested an tried (they will not tell you how much, so probably not that much). They have tried to figure out the size of the search population that converts most optimally to sales. Unfortunately, there is no exact number, but between 10000 and 100000 per month is supposed to be optimum. That is still a wide span but reasonable guidance, although you do not have to test to reason it out.
But it takes a couple of hours to do this. The next step takes even longer, and that is the research. You can not just drop a title of a book on an author and expect 30 pages of content back. Not for 50 dollars, not even for 500. But if you provide them with a decent list of relevant URLs you could at least expect something useful for 100 dollars. it is enough to pay for a full days work at a low but not unreasonable hourly wage.
the question is really how much work you should expect to put in doing the research. Let us say you put in 80 hours, which is more than what I believe the people I am talking about would put in. And then, there is a considerable amount of management that needs to be put in - at least ten hours per book. This means a 30 page book takes around 100 hours.
Let us assume you do two a month. You have to deduct 300 dollars from the 2100, so you have 1800 left. Divide that by 200, and you will see that at an hourly wage of 9 dollars per hour you will not exactly be overpaid. It is better than what you get at Seven-Eleven and McDonalds, but not much. importantly too, you have to get up into 150 books before you start making that kind of money. If you spend 2 weeks researching a book (and let me tell you from my 15 book experience, it takes at least 2 months to do really goid research. Working fulltime.), then it takes 75 months to get 150 books together. That is almost seven years. And the Get Rich With Kindle schemes have not been around that long. Clearly, these people are not prioritizing the quality of their books.
There are two things you can do: shorten the research time, and spin the books.
If you shorten the research time, say to two days, you can produce four books a month. then, it would take about three years to write 150 books. I somehow doubt they have that kind of patience. I think they use a different tactic: spin the books.
If you remember my discussion about copyright in a previous post, two authors who are provided with the same material will produce two very different products, given the appropriate level of freedom. And that is what I think they do - give the material to more than one writer, and ask them to write about it. If you ask four authors to write about a material, you get four different books. If you have a big enough niche, why not milk it some more? The people who did not like one title and cover may like another, in particulsr if they think it is done by a different author. So they probably publish two versions. Or three. Or five. Not more than five I would think though, that tires out the niche. It still means you are able to publish 20 books in a month, 10 if you are a bit more serious about research. You would still have 150 books in 15 months.
Traditional publishers could not do this, even if they had such an effective way of finding groups who may be interested in the books. And if you want to be serious about this, I must stress, just looking at the Google keyword tool is not enough. While traditional publishers went by gut feeling, there is no need to limit the research to what your stomach may tell you. There are many more efficient tools available nowadays, that can also tell you about the potential customers willingness to pay. And if you believed in your authors, and cared about your readers, you as a publisher could match up authors with topics, creating a series of books covering a subject from different angles.
In that case, the authors would probably expect a decent pay. 100 dollars is about 6 to 10 hours of work, depending on how you value your time. If you only were to do a rewrite based on existing material, it would probably be done in 6 hours. That gives you an hourly pay of 16 dollars, which is not bad, but not particularly good either. If you were to pay yourself the same as a publisher, you would get about 2700 dollars per month.
Wait. The guy I have been referencing took home 2100 dollar per month. And now he has to pay 1500 dollars to the people prooducing the books. He gets 600 dollars a month in his pocket? That is hardly worth writing home about.
If you lower the ambition level to five books per month, you would have to wait two years until you got up to 150, but then the level of production becomes self-sustaining. You have to pay 750 dollars out of 2100 for the books, which means you take home a little less than 8.5 dollars per hour. I am assuming normal 40-hour weeks, if not the business case gets even worse.
Hardly a get-rich-quick scheme. No wonder he is selling courses.
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