🥰 Romance Ghostwriter 🔜 Amazon KDP Riches? (update #8)

Today marks book #2 in this KDP series coming out, so I wanna give you an update on this project.

Including what the first month looked like.

More on that in a moment.

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Month One - A Success Or Not?

So, quick refresh - I totally fucked the release of book one in terms of promos.

Did a couple of promos a little while into it.

The month ended. And TODAY book two was released….and I dinked that release too.

Truthfully? I’ve been so immersed in Growth Cupid stuff that the release date just snuck up on me.

So, I’ve prepared nothing for book two - but it did manage to get 7 pre-orders off the promos for book one.

Now, let’s look at book one and how this first month went for me.

The KENP reads are the number of pages read by people who downloaded the book via Kindle Unlimited.

For those of you who don’t know, Kindle Unlimited is like Netflix for ebooks with the caveat that the only books that are in it are those that cannot be available anywhere other than Amazon.

Readers pay $11.99/month (at least in the USA) for this service. They can essentially read an infinity number of books each month.

Authors get paid by the page read and KENP pages do not = the number of pages you see in your Kindle. It’s some mystery calculation that Amazon inevitably uses to fuck authors.

Here’s the number they give me for book one:

182 pages. That means a full read nets me around $0.73.

For those page reads, authors are paid from the KDP Select Global Fund which is usually a fraction of a penny per KENP page.

Seriously. I think it’s always been around $0.005 since it’s inception.

This page gets updated with payouts almost regularly. Keep in mind that Amazon pays out two months after the month ends, just like with Amazon affiliate monies.

So, to make a meaningful amount from KU reads, you need a really long book or to move a LOT of units in KU.

Obviously, the more books you have in KU that people are borrowing, the more you can stack those pennies.

Literally. Pennies.

Yes, I’m salty about how Amazon devalues the work of authors.

And now, the real question - how much did book one make during this first month?

Not much at $42.84, but honestly I’m fine with this.

I launched a new pen name in a VERY crowded niche and managed to score sales and reviews. I call that a win.

Here’s how the reviews/ratings look on Amazon -

And here’s Goodreads -

While I’d prefer to at least be a 4-star, I’m not to bummed about the rating because a 3-star on Goodreads means “I like it” (if I remember correctly).

For book one, I spent $130 on promos and around $1500 for the book.

Here’s book two -

It was published today and already has a sales rank thanks to the seven pre-orders. Though oddly only six sales are showing up in my dashboard.

Typically Amazon fuckery, I presume. Though if I were to inquire, I suspect I would be told something like the seventh person’s payment didn’t go through.

Anyways, this book is not yet free cause I need to figure out some promos. But if you’re paying for Kindle Unlimited, you can check it out for free now.

Book #2 has made $12.51 from those six pre-order sales, which works out to $2.085 per book.

And if it gets KU page reads, then here’s what a full read will look like:

So, 257 KENP pages or roughly $1.15 per full KU read.

More updates on this soon.

Coming up…

Upcoming topics: more tips and ideas on Etsy and KDP, how it’s going with my chatGPT fiction ebook and the AI music thingie, and growing an ecomm site.

If you have a topic you want covered just reply and let me know.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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