Amazon has a program that allows authors to write directly to their platform without using a publisher. I have four books for sale on there. It's not that tough to get paid sales. One of the best ways to do it is to give your book away for a little while to raise its sales rate. I was able to "sell" thousands of books that way and that then translated over into hundreds of paid sales.

If anyone has experience publishing to the platform and good ways to rack up more sales that would be great to hear about.

Kindle Direct Publishing: http://www.amazonkdp.com/

An example of a book I have on there: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005REX1O6 FREE for the next 5 days

How much money have you made doing this? How many hours total have you put into this (including research for writing the books, but not prior fun research before you were writing a book)? Was it fun? Would you write another book? How much commission does Amazon take from this platform?

I published my first book on there in 2011. I had a large upsurge in sales at that time using free giveaways and promoting the book on various kindle facebook pages. I had about 300 paid sales at a 70 percent commission. If you price your book above 2.99 your cut is 70 percent of the sales price. So I was making about 2.00 per book. Here is where I made a mistake. I decided to pull the book from the shelf because I wanted to work on editing it better.

I probably put 50 hours into writing, promoting, and editing my main book on there. The others I have under pen names and are on experiments that I sell for .99 cents.

It's very easy to upload a book to their site. You can create it using Microsoft word for no cost. Writing a book can be tedious so that part of it isn't fun. The fun part is a sense of accomplishment after its done. I'm definitely going to write more books and I think that they will become more professional in appearance as I practice more.

I remember listening to a podcast from James Altucher with some guy that did this after getting laid off.

episode 83 : https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/...794030859?mt=2

Thanks for this. Dude is making a lot.

I see they closed your other thread. I think your picks will beat the market slightly. However, in this video somewhere
Kyle Bass seemed to be in same boat, applying to Wall Street. But he eventually got a job, but I don't think they would have picked him if they knew he was leaving in a year and a half. I think you should keep trying and resend. I thought boredsocial was my personal troll.

Thanks for the free download looking forward to reading it this week when Im in Mexico and will get a review up .

Congrats on getting your publications out there. I've published a few on Amazon and its a true labor of love. I'm still working on how to rack up the sales, but have used the same free download strat to similar success with a turn around of a few hundred books.

I have another book that is already finished and feel it has appeal as I'm an industry expert and have partnered with others who have the success I wish to attain. I'm just sitting on it to get things into place for the right time, but regardless of what happens with $$ I'm excited to get my baby out there.

The one thing I've learned over the years..

Selling books = extremely difficult and do it for the creativity and challenge, and always keep the day job .

I hope you like the book. GL with yours.

I've written and published two books on Amazon so far over the past couple years and I'm currently working on book number three with a couple more titles on the back burners. Of the two published so far, the first one has averaged perhaps a couple sales per day while the latest one about half of that.

Some important factors to consider are honing in on a particular niche in which your book can be competitive, an attractive cover, smart use of keywords in the title and description (so that potential readers will find you searching both on Amazon and Google), and experimenting with pricing so as to find the sweetspot that brings in the most revenue (not necessarily the most sales). I currently have my books prices at $4.99. I don't make as many sales as @ $2.99 but I seem to earn more overall revenue at this price point. Also, if you can get lots of good honest reviews, that will also help bolster sales.

I know there are some people who simply research potentially profitable titles and then outsource the entire writing, design and formatting process, but I actually enjoy the writing. I'm still learning the process myself but I love earning residual income from work I did one time. Good luck!

I may be biased but if you're going to go through the trouble of writing and publishing a book, go all the way and make it look polished with a real cover. Nothing screams "buy me, I'm a real book" quite like a 30-minute MS Paint job that looks like a picnic flyer.

At least invest a few hundred bucks and get a student or some kid on 99designs to do something.

My cover is terrible so I am hiring a person to me me a book cover. It's going to cost 200 bucks so it stings a little bit. I'll report the difference in sales here when I get the new cover from the artist.