Writing Kindle eBooks Review After a Year


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What I'll be talking about is: writing ebooks for Kindle Direct Publishing; where anyone who wants to can write an ebook with relative ease. And, the best part is Amazon will pay you a good royalty for every sale. This post isn't a how to, but a simple year long review- sharing my thoughts on the experience of writing 7 ebooks for Kindle Direct. 

Overall the experience for me has been a complete bonus, a very rewarding endeavor I'm grateful to have the opportunity to try. I have always loved to express myself through writing, yet the actual work of writing sometimes tones down my work ethic towards the craft itself. This bit of immaturity in my writing is being challenged by writing ebooks. Of course, the blogs and other writing revenue sharing sites are a challenge too, but ebooks is more of a challenge. Your bigger works would be written in an ebook, more in-depth and even more creative. Not to mention the bigger possibility of making money. Of course we can't value our blogging impact by money figures, and for some blogging is a better platform to make money- nevertheless, for me ebooks has more potential to make money than blogging. 

   I've been writing my ebooks now for a year, the first ebook was published 11 months ago, it is called RV Living. This was simply a longer article I couldn't find a home for, so I used it to try Kindle Direct out not thinking I would really be successful even to get it to go through for sale. It did go up for sale and it has actually been the best seller of all the 7 ebooks I've written now! Kind of funny, cause some of the ebooks I spent the most time on and wrote the most in are the ones that were almost complete duds. I'm not one to pander to any audience though, I write what I feel God is putting on my heart. That doesn't mean it's always directly about God, but it's glory to Jesus all the time anyway. 

   There is a two month delay in payment, which comes at the end of the month deposited in my bank account. So, I've been getting paid for 9 months now. The total amount I've made from all my Kindle ebooks in 9 months is:

Total: $215

$23.89/ month

$30.71/ ebook


That is great to me, the best month I had was $59. Really the work I put in to make these 5k-20k word ebooks wasn't that great considering the payout it brings over time. I mean every month for years I'll get paid something from these 7 books, if any sale that month. It's great residual income, and all the money I've made is from ebooks that have simple covers I made in Paint. So, if a person were to write about a popular topic and have a professional cover then they could do very well indeed writing ebooks. I'm talking full-time living type money. For me, I have a buy and sell business on Ebay and Amazon, so I don't want or have the time it would take to try and make a full-time income from writing ebooks. I still think it could be done within a couple years with a full-time effort. And I'm talking authentic ebooks really written by YOU, not a Odesk worker who you pay $20. To each their own, but I love writing too much to sell my name off under someone elses' words. 


  I would like to get to where I can make a couple hundred a month from my ebooks, so I'm going to put more of an effort into writing each work day. I'm always writing, but the key is to focus it and direct it to the right place with the right mindset to make an ebook that's worth reading (and not too many mistakes grammatically). 

 The cost of my ebooks to buy has almost always been .99 cents. One time I changed some of them to $2.99 to get the 70% royalty, but soon changed it back wanting to sell more books rather. The other way to make money is through enrolling (simply check a box when publishing your ebook) in the Kindle Select Program. This means your ebook can only be sold through Amazon, but you get paid when a Kindle Select member reader reads any pages of your ebook. Those members get the select books for free, and we get paid about a half a cent for every page they read. So they read 100 pages then we get paid about .50 cents. This money is added to the money you make when outright sell a book. For me at .99 cents generally I get paid .35 cents, which is 30% royalty. If you sell an ebook for 2.99 or higher it's 70% royalty. 

If your looking to write ebooks, check out Kindle Direct. Go through the process, read the directions and go to Youtube for instruction videos when you get lost or confused. When you need help watch a YouTube tutorial and you will be fine. The hardest part about writing an ebook is learning to format the document from Office or Word to Kindle Direct. This isn't that hard through if you are willing to take a couple hours and watch some videos.Writing ebooks on Kindle is a great opportunity for the writer who wants to be heard and even make some money. There are also options Kindle gives to make your books available through audio or even a hard copy of the book itself.

   Hopefully this review of my first year was helpful and interesting. I likely missed saying some things, but I'll write some more posts about ebooks in the future. Hopefully sales grow and I can write something worth being read. For now, goodbye and God bless. Subscribe to the blog or my Youtube channel for this blog called A Writer's Review.

A Writer's Review on YouTube Link

Robbie Newport's eBooks Link



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