081: Kindle Publishing with Dave Koziel

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show, Episode 81 Kindle publishing with Dave Koziel. Hey, everyone. I want to welcome you back to the Robert Plank show. This is the Internet Marketing Podcast where we talk about making money, and today we have a very special guest on. His name is Dave Koziel, and his website is publish with dave.com and we're gonna talk about publishing on Amazon Kindle, which is their digital bookstore. And the greatest thing about Amazon Kindle is, literally, if you have an idea, or you have a book half done, all the way done, whatever Amazon only wants from you, the title, description, a Word document, what to price it, and basically, you are now a published author on Amazon, and so we have Mr. Dave Koziel on the line. He's going to talk us through how he makes between 10 and $30,000 a month from playing around and publishing these books that he makes out of thin air on Amazon. And what I really like about Dave is today, he's going to reveal a lot of his deepest, darkest secrets when it comes to Kindle, and he's going to be sharing some sharing some real numbers, because honestly, what frustrates me about a lot of people teaching Kindle is they leave a lot of stuff out, or they teach you to slave away for a year making your one single book, or they don't even want to reveal to you their niches or the books. But Dave today is going to be talking to us about some real stuff, some real strategies, some real fun techniques and things on how to make money from Amazon. So is there anything I left out about you today? Dave,

Dave Koziel 1:28 no, you pretty much covered it. Robert, thanks for having me on. I appreciate you doing this, and I'm excited to share what I got with everybody. Awesome.

Robert Plank 1:34 So this whole Kindle thing, how long you've been doing it?

Dave Koziel 1:40 Well, I've been doing Kindle publishing, publishing ebooks on Amazon since about October, 2014 and it actually wasn't how I got started with making money online. Before I was doing publishing ebooks, I was selling physical products on Amazon and eBay, and I kind of ran into a little bit of trouble with that. I wasn't really enjoying it so much, and I found some videos on YouTube about some people who were making big money doing this, and it wasn't the way that you would think it would be, like you said, it wasn't the people who were spending a year slaving away writing one book and then publishing it. It was people who were actually hiring writers, ghost writers, to write books for them, and then publishing on Amazon and making big money. And that really intrigued me is

Robert Plank 2:24 that the way that you make a lot of your books, you don't write them yourself, you just hire other people to write them for you,

Dave Koziel 2:29 exactly. And the reason it intrigued me was because if you're going to be writing your own books, which I have wrote two of my own books. However, the problem with that is it's very, very hard to scale and it's very hard to scale fast, especially it takes some time to write a book. I think that even doing it quickly, it takes about a few weeks to a month if you want to write a short book, to get it done. However, with the method that I was finding out about online, and that I actually have used to make a lot of money, is I hire the writers, and I hire multiple writers at a time. So my writers are pumping me out books on a weekly basis. Some of them takes two weeks. Some of them takes a little bit less. But the idea is that you can have multiple writers writing for you at one time to create the content for you, so that you can scale this business up and publish a lot of books in a short period of time.

Robert Plank 3:17 And this is awesome, because I don't know if you were around for the days when article marketing was a big thing, or the days when AdSense were a big thing, like this used to be the way to make money. You go and, you know, outsource it, or find some cheap labor and get an article made for five bucks, or a site made for 10 bucks. And, you know, just that one article, or that one site would only make $1 a day, but you have 10 or 100 of them, and then now you're cranking away. So you mentioned that. So you hire people out to write a book for you. It takes about two weeks to come back. So I mean, what kind of, what kind of size book are we talking about? And, like, what? How much does that cost you? Sure

Dave Koziel 3:56 the books can range anywhere. They're shorter books. We're not talking about 300 page books here. We're talking about books that are anywhere between 6000 to 12,000 words. That's generally the length that I recommend, especially for people who are getting started. Because I approach all of this. This is important to note too. I approach all this as a business. My goal with this is to make a profit. My goal isn't to actually create a best selling New York Times selling book. My goal is with every book I publish to make a profit, and you have to really take into consideration your cost. So for example, it's going to cost me more money to have a 12,000 book written for me, as opposed to a 6000 word book written for me. So what I like to do is, I like to kind of approach this with the minimal viable product outlook, where, if I can publish a book for only 6000 words and it starts to sell well, and I'm seeing traction and it's getting sales, then I can go back and hire the same writer again, even you even hire a different writer if you want to add more content to that book, to make it longer and to increase. The value of it. So generally speaking, 6000 to 12,000 words is what I recommend when you're starting off and you have to pay some additional costs too, such as you have to pay for it to get a cover made. You have to pay to do the formatting, unless you want to do it yourself. You're going to have to pay for a virtual assistant to help you with with the marketing and getting some reviews for it, unless you undo that yourself too. But generally, you're talking in the ballpark of anywhere between 80 to $150 per book to get you started. That's kind of a good starting point.

Robert Plank 5:29 Okay, so 80 to 150 and then, I mean, what would you say on average? Or like, what would you expect a book like that to make? The

Dave Koziel 5:40 amount you're going to make for each book is going to vary. Kind of what I was saying in the beginning, some books just take off. It's kind of like this, for those of you who are familiar with the 8020 principle, whenever you publish a large library of books, for example, I have between 60 to 80 books that I have had published throughout doing this whole process, and the minority of my books end up making out, making up the majority of my income. But just to kind of give you a general kind of guideline, a bad book for me, this is a bad book. And keep in mind too, this is just the Kindle ebook. We can talk about this a little bit later, if we have time. But I also turn those ebooks into paperback books and audio books, which makes me additional money, but just as an e book, I can generally expect even a bad book for me to make around 20 to $25 per month, and a really, really good book that that does well, I can make in the hundreds of dollars per month. Nice

Robert Plank 6:32 so, I mean, so some books, I mean the cost that it took you to make it, that's what it makes month over month. But even kind of a dud, you still break even after three or four months.

Dave Koziel 6:43 Yeah, exactly over the course of a year, you're still going to make profit on the book. You're still going to get your investment back. It just might take you six months to get it back, as opposed to the three months if you have a better selling book.

Robert Plank 6:55 But I mean, still, that's awesome. And if you're talking about messing around with paid traffic or things like that, you might throw all kinds of money into something and and never even see the money back. So you know what really scared me at first with all this Amazon Kindle stuff was it seemed like that Amazon was just trying to undercut everybody, right? It seemed like, well, now I'm giving away all my all my stuff, for $1 for $5 and then when Kindle started to take off, I noticed a lot of kind of, I don't know, scumbag marketers just trying to game the system, right? They they'd say, Well, flood the market with public domain stuff. Or they'd say, we'll take a book and just do a search and replace the characters, like Search and Replace, you know, Huckleberry Finn, and then put out that book. But from what I what little I've seen about this whole strategy of making just like a, like an army of small books, basically, I've seen that there. It's kind of reached a middle ground, right? And, I mean, let me know if I'm wrong. But it seems like a lot of these people like now, there's some thought into that goes into it where they say, Well, I'm actually going to do some, you know, keyword research, or I'm going to look at what's, what's a big problem people are having, or what people are searching for, and then I'm going to, based on that, look at where there's low competition, or where I can beat the competition. I mean is that, is that kind of what the ideas here? I mean, not just to flood the market with a bunch of random books, but to actually look at what people are searching for and what's selling, right? Yeah, there's

Dave Koziel 8:23 definitely a whole strategy to it. I remember, I think, in the golden days, maybe like in early 2012 when Kindle just was getting started, I think you could pretty much publish anything and make money. It was just kind of people were dumb. They didn't understand, so they were just throwing their money away buying anything. But now there's, there's a lot more quality control, and there's a lot more research that goes into it. You have to pay attention to profitable niches. You have to do extensive keyword research, and this is all stuff that takes some time to learn, and also too. Another important thing is you have to pay attention to the quality of writer that you're hiring. Some people like to try to hire writers from the Philippines and countries like that who don't speak good English, and then the book that they write is complete crap. If you go through it, it doesn't even make sense. But if you treat it actually like you were hiring an employee, meaning, whenever you're hiring your writers and your team, and you actually take the time, you can still find very, very high quality writers and virtual assistants and graphic designers for you to do all this at a very affordable cost. And I'm going to give you an example. I have this one book. The title of it is called foraging. And if you don't know what foraging is, it's kind of when you go around and you pick plants that you can eat and that they have medicinal properties to them. And I know nothing about the book. However, I found a woman who was a stay at home mom, and she just wanted to be able to make an income from home as a writer. And she was a certified herbalist. She had all these different accolations, and I actually interviewed her on my YouTube channel. I have a YouTube channel. If you go look on there, you'll find the interview I did with her, and she wrote me this amazing book on the topic of foraging. And she was an expert way more than you know I could ever be, or I would even know about forging. And that book that she wrote me has sold, has made me hundreds of dollars per month ever since I had it published, which was like early 2015 so that kind of just gives you an example of the type of quality now and the way that you need to treat this. You can't just treat this as, like you said publishing public domain books, which you can still do, but you have to make special alterations to them to be able to do. But for the most part, if you want to be able to make good money doing this, you have to publish quality stuff. You have to take time. You have to treat it as a business. You can't just throw garbage up on the Kindle store and expect it to sell well.

Robert Plank 10:38 And I mean, that's good and bad news. It sounds like, because, I mean, you do have to. It sounds like you sounds like you have to put in a little more of a thought process. But it also weeds out the people who just, who aren't thinking. So, you know, you mentioned like this, this foraging example. So it makes me curious. Like, What is your thought process when you're going to make a new Kindle book? I mean, in a couple different, couple different kind of avenues there. Like, one thing I'm kind of curious about is, well, do any of your books or connect together? And then the other thing I'm curious about is, I mean, how do you even come up with something like foraging? Do you, like, browse a category or just choose something at random? I mean, like, what's your thought process when you're making a new book like that? Yeah,

Dave Koziel 11:23 I can explain both those questions. The first one is, yes, my books do connect. What I work on doing is I create a fake pen name around, for example, my one that I talked about with this forging book is His name is John Franz, F, R, A, N, Z, and it was just something, some name I created not a real person. And what I do was I publish, I create, like a little persona about him. So if you go look, he actually has an Author Central profile, and I actually create books that are fitting for his pen name, for his profile. So for example, John Frantz talks a lot about herbal remedies, natural remedies, some self help stuff. I don't I don't publish books under that John Franz pen name that are about business. I just kind of keep them within the niche that I carved out and the way that I found that niche, and the way I go about determining what books that I want to publish is, I'm purely looking for what is profitable. I don't publish books that I just because I like them, just because I think they're cool. I'm purely looking for a book that I know that I can publish, that's going to be on a topic and niche that I can make money from. And you don't really have to do much research to find this out. All you really have to do is go to Amazon. Amazon. The good and bad thing about publishing ebooks on Amazon is that all the information is right on Amazon as far as what's selling, meaning, you can check the sales ranks. You can see how, how well a book is ranking in the search results. The bad thing is that it's easy for the competition to be able to see what you're doing and copy you, but all I do is, this is a simple process. I go to the best sellers list and I just start digging into the category. So for example, the way that I found foraging was I went to the best sellers list, and I went into a couple categories, and I just kept clicking. If you go look at the categories on Amazon, you can go pretty deep on some of them. You can go from like health and fitness, and from health and fitness, you can go into dieting. From dieting, you can go into like, further diets. You can keep niching down. And what I ended up doing was I just found in the best sellers list, I found a book that was about foraging, not mine. I didn't have mine published yet, but I found one that was selling very well. And I thought to myself, hmm, I don't, I don't think that. I think I can make a book similar to this one, or better. And if this book is selling, it's a proof of concept that it's selling. If I can make a better book than this one, if I can market it better, if I can pick better keywords, which are things that I learned how to do, I know that I can make at least the same amount of money or better. And that's kind of the similar process that I use for each of my books that I publish.

Robert Plank 13:55 And I didn't even realize how crazy this was because I just looked up John Franz, his Author Central page. And, I mean, there's like, yeah, there's a whole bio about him. There's like, a stock photo of him sitting on a bench with a bike and his wife. And it's like, I mean, it's pretty crazy. Like, I knew that, I knew that you could publish a book and you could publish it under like, any kind of name, but I didn't realize you could, you could create a whole persona just around this. This one like fake identity. That's kind of cool. So alright, so you look at these books, you kind of stumble on things that are already like, proven to sell well, and you kind of make a better mousetrap. So I mean, how often do you make a new book? Like, is there a schedule, or is it just whenever

Dave Koziel 14:40 I'm at the point now where I have about 6080, books published, and I'm not actively publishing new books on my own, and that's that's one thing that I recommend to people, too, is when you're first getting started, don't just think that you're going to publish unlimited books and you're just going to keep going and to make as much money as you can, you need to have a goal for the. Beginning like, Okay, I want to make $10,000 per month, and then you just keep publishing books up until you get to that point. Because there's a lot of other ways that you can make money from publishing ebooks, not just from the act of publishing themselves. So what you what I've done is in my business now I've got to the point where I got my 6880 books out, my eBooks out, and now I'm using that same exact content, which is really important. A lot of very smart internet marketers use do this. They reuse their content, and as I talked about earlier, I published them on paperback books on a website called createspace.com I published them as an audio book on a website called acx.com I also, within the books, use them to generate leads for an email list, and then from that email list I sell affiliate offers to them to make money. And there's a few other different ways too, that I that I make money. But as you can see there, you can really just start off with the ebook and then grow it into a pretty large income stream. And to answer your question about for maybe people starting off who want to do this. How many do I recommend? I was at my peak publishing around three to five books per week. But I caution you don't go out of the gate starting that much. I recommend you get one book done and then you just mess around with that one book for as long as it takes, until you're getting it selling. Because if you publish a book and it's and it's not selling, and you just keep publishing more thinking, Oh, screw it. I'll just figure it out along the way, you're basically going to be replicating your same mistakes over and over and over again with each book. So it's important to master one book First, figure out how to get it to selling, or at least figure out what you did wrong with that book as to why it wouldn't sell. Because if you pick a horrible niche that's not profitable. It's not going to sell, no matter how well or how well you do everything else, but figure out how to make one book sell, use that as a model, and then just publish work upon that and publish more books. But I really wouldn't recommend exceeding more than three to five books per week. That's going to take a lot of work and effort, even with virtual assistants, and things can start to get a little hairy once you get to that level. I mean,

Robert Plank 17:03 it seems like it right? Because you have to manage who's making the books, and manage all these covers, and manage all these, all these promotions and things like that. But, I mean, and that makes sense, yeah? And then if you make a book, and yeah, like you said, like, there's some books where it seems like, if it's a bad niche, it doesn't matter how hard you try, or how hard you market, like, if you make 10 more bad books like that. I mean, that's just circling the drain, going more and more downhill. So, so you mentioned about, as we you know, got started here. You mentioned about your virtual assistants and about the marketing and things like that. So, I mean, do you want to talk about that, about, like, the marketing and the reviews and all that kind of stuff. Yeah,

Dave Koziel 17:42 sure. What I did whenever I was at my peak, when I was publishing three to five books per week, I actually had a team of, I think it was about at least five virtual assistants working for me. By virtual assistants, I also do mean writers too, and I'll kind of give you a breakdown of how that worked. So I had, obviously had my writers, then I had, I had a graphic designer, which I just found on a site. It was odesk.com at the time, but now it's upwork.com I had someone that I also hired, another virtual assistant, which were at three now, who formatted the books for me, because that's, that's a skill in itself that take. That's kind of a pain to do, but you can learn to do it yourself. Then I also had a virtual assistant who uploaded the books to me on the createspace.com website as a paperback, and also uploaded it on acx.com as an audiobook. For me, I had that part of the process, and then I also had a virtual assistant who helped me with the marketing and reviews. And I'm going to touch on that a little bit, because that's one of the most important parts that I think people struggle with and is vital to your success, because your reviews are your social proof. You need to have reviews on your book to make it so if you just publish books, you can have the most amazing book and the most profitable niche. But if you don't have any reviews on your book, then it's not going to sell. And Amazon has really cracked down recently, over the past few months, on reviews. So it can be very, very tricky for you to be able to get them, and I'm going to give some a few tips on how you can get them and how you can train a virtual assistant to do this for you. One of the ways you can do it, which is completely allowed by Amazon, is doing honest review swaps, meaning you go to another person who has a book, and you both read each other's books, you can skim through. You don't have to read the whole thing, and then you leave an honest review for the other person. That strategy still works. It's allowed by Amazon. The problem is you can't have a virtual assistant do this, and who's just gonna be doing it with other virtual assistants, because that's gonna set up a red flag with Amazon of two people with two fake accounts, basically that their whole goal is to just get reviews. That's going to be trouble. Your reviews are going to be deleted. You don't want to do that. So if you have a virtual assistant doing that for you, you need to make sure that your virtual assistant is a real person, not some person that's from the Philippines and creating fake Amazon accounts, someone. Literally, is actually a Kindle reader has their own own Kindle account. Who, who enjoys reading books, has a legitimate account that they buy stuff from on Amazon, and then they're seeking out legitimate people, other people like themselves, just like me and you, who have have an Amazon account and buy stuff and get reviews that way. That's one way to do it, and I'm going to give one other way, real quick, another way you can do it, which is actually probably the best way I recommend, is if you have a book that you publish, say, for example, my foraging book, what you can do on Amazon is, if there's someone else with a similar book to yours, which there should be, because you shouldn't be publishing a book that's not already out there and has proven to be profitable, you can go to the reviews on their book, and if you click on the reviewers, you can usually find their email address by just clicking on the name of the person who left the reviews. And you can compile a list of those email addresses, and you can send them an email, and you're allowed to offer them a free pdf version of your book in exchange for an honest review. Now this strategy is time consuming, that's why I actually recommend that you train a virtual assistant to do this. And you're not going to get 100% results. But for example, you might compile a list of 100 email addresses from using this method, and if you have a virtual assistant email all of them, you might get 15 to 20 reviews, which is perfect. That's about all you really need to get in and get started. And then as time goes on, there's other strategies that you can use to continuously add reviews to your book, but that's sort of an overall breakdown of the way that use virtual assistants, and especially how you can get reviews for your book, which is really important, man.

Robert Plank 21:36 And those two pieces of advice, I mean, I think that if people only get one or two things out of this call, which they're gonna get a lot more. But like for me, at least, like the two biggies were those two things right there, like the honest review swap, so contact other authors and honestly review their book and have them review your book as well, and then go and look at people who have reviewed other books, and have your virtual assistant find their email address and just hit them up and compile a list in exchange for a PDF copy for an honest review. Because, I mean, I know that, at least with me, like I haven't, I do want to get into this, having all the, you know, the pen names and all the separate books, and all I've done so far is I've published 10 books under my own name, but they're, you know, internet marketing books, stuff about my own niche, 100 or 200 pages. And, I mean, at first I was thinking, Okay, well, my only, the only thing I'm worried about is just, I need to get it online. I'll worry about the rest later. And then I got kind of tired, and then I went back, and I realized maybe, like, a year or two later, let, oh, I this whole time, I should have been doing things to to get reviews and things like that. So, I mean, this is pretty cool. Like, it seems like you have a pretty good, streamlined system down at this point where you just have, you just basically have your checklist. Like, it seems like you, whenever you want to have a new book created, then you go and you drill down into the categories in these best sellers, find some decent things to kind of emulate. And then you go to Upwork, and you hire a virtual assistant to write the book for you that comes back. You hire a VA to format it for you that comes back. You hire someone to upload to Kindle, upload to create space, upload to ACX, and then once that's up and running, then you hire people to market it for you and basically do the reviews. So out of curiosity, like so you mentioned about you hire somebody to upload to kindle and create space. Is there a way to give somebody guest access, or do you basically have to just trust them with your account. You

Dave Koziel 23:40 kind of have to just trust them with your account. There's this one software that you can use called LastPass, L, A S, T, P, A, S, s.com, I believe it is, and what it does is you can create, sort of like a dummy password. You have to download the program, and whatever virtual assistant you're using also has to download it. And I believe there's a free version too, and you can actually create a sort of a fake password to give to them so that they don't actually have access to your, your real password. They just have access to the last past password. So technically, they still have access to your account, but they can't actually, they don't actually have your, your real password that you have for, like your Amazon account. So third, there is a trust factor that you have to develop. And the way that I actually went about doing it was I didn't give access to my virtual assistant to my account right away. The the one, I only gave it to one virtual assistant, and I hired him first, and he worked for me for about a month or two, just formatting the books for me, and I started to see that he was doing a good job. He was trustworthy. I didn't have any red flags that came up that made me think that he was going to do anything. And then I just gave him access to it. I actually first I gave him access to my Createspace account, which you can create a different password for your Createspace. Account that then your Amazon account, and once he had access to my Createspace account, and I realized that he wasn't doing anything bad, he didn't mess anything up, then I also gave him access to my Amazon account, which is the same account that I buy stuff on. So technically, he could have went and purchased anything he wanted if he really wanted to, but he didn't do that. So that's kind of the process that I went through to trusting a virtual assistant and giving them access to my accounts.

Robert Plank 25:24 And I guess, if you think about it early on, if they only have access to your create space and they mess something up and you want to kick them out, you can always reset them, even if they change the password on you have you control your email address, so you can just reset that, I

Dave Koziel 25:37 guess. Yeah, exactly. So they, that's what I'd recommend doing you. They can't really do much your your create space account is not connected to your Amazon account, so there's not really much damage they could do except delete all your books or unpublish all your books or something. But that's not really that big of a deal. You can get that fixed pretty easily

Robert Plank 25:56 because you have, like, I mean, is that because you have the word document saved, or is there a way to get it back out of the trash? Well,

Dave Koziel 26:04 it's mainly because you have them saved. You might be able to contact CreateSpace, and if they would delete all your books or something, you might be able to get them to get your bring your book back somehow. But the biggest thing that you'd probably have to worry about is a virtual assistant stealing your book. But I don't think that there's a way. I don't I don't know this 100% for sure. I don't think there's a way that they can actually, well, I guess you would have to send them your file to upload to create space, so technically, they already have access to your file, but that would be my biggest concern. With a virtual assistant and giving them your Createspace account. It's not them actually doing anything your books. I don't think that they would care to do that. It would be them taking your content that you give them and then selling it to someone else, or using it themselves.

Robert Plank 26:48 And I guess, if you're super paranoid about that, that could be like, the one thing you don't outsource, right? Yeah,

Dave Koziel 26:54 you don't all this stuff. Actually, you can do I'm just, most people want to have the four hour work week, and, you know, have have everything automated. That's why I kind of explain it like this. But there was a point whenever I first started, like when I gave the advice to just on your first book, figure out how to do everything. I did everything myself for the very first book that I published. And you can do this all yourself. You're just not going to be able to publish three to five books per week if you're going to be doing everything by yourself yourself, you might only be able to do one book per week, and to be able to do it and having, while having to do everything by yourself

Robert Plank 27:29 well and yeah, and that's kind of the way that I like to think about making a new income stream as well, is that for the first few weeks, I mean, I'm just playing around, and I kind of do want to do It the slow way myself, so that when it comes time to automate it, I know what goes into it, or I can do it all myself the first couple of times and then automate a piece of it until, you know, when, a little bit at a time, until I have that whole system down. And, I mean, I really, I mean, I really like this, whatever this, culture that's developed with Amazon Kindle. I mean, like we said, like, at first, no one really knew what the heck to do. And it seems like it's definitely kind of settled into, into this, something where anyone can make money doing this, as long as you, you know, make a few decisions and do a few experiments and see where it goes. And I think something that's really, really kind of crazy is that this is one of those income streams, kind of like you mentioned eBay or Amazon FBA, where you don't even have to use your own name, your own picture, your own list credibility. You just kind of build in this other super high traffic marketplace and and create something that that the marketplace, like the website itself, wants, but then also what all the customers want. And I mean, I really like, I'm glad that you shared all the details that you shared today, just because, I mean, like we said, Some people make things really vague, and whenever I'm getting into something, I'm like, Well, I want to know at least the rough numbers. So it seems like what we're talking about today is so you go around and you find some of these best sellers, and then basically, you can expect, in about two weeks, to have your own book, a book of about 6000 to 12,000 words. And then, with the whole process, about 80 to $150 per book. And then, if you've done your keyword research right, if you do your marketing right, then basically what you yourself expect is for a bad book to do 20 to $25 a month, and then a good book to do about $100 a month. And so it's pretty cool, because you can get started quickly and see some little results and then just go in and repeat what works. So as we're winding this down, Dave, is there one particular mistake that you see when you're doing your research that you see a lot of these Amazon authors making? Yeah,

Dave Koziel 29:50 the biggest, biggest mistake that I see people make is they choose poor niches, and they choose poor keywords, and the niche thing can just be. Resolve by doing the process that I explained as going in and doing the research on the best seller list. For whatever reason, people just skip that step. And I see this all the time with the people that I work with, the people that I coach, they literally just try to publish books that that they like, and you're not you got to approach it differently. You can't you have to approach it with the mindset of a business and that you're going into this to make a profit. You're not doing this if you want to publish books that you like, that's fine, but don't expect to make money from them. And the second biggest thing that I see is people choosing poor keywords. Their keywords is a topic that we get have a whole separate podcast talking about, but they are, they are very, very important because, like you said, within Amazon, Amazon already has the customers. That's the beauty of this. And what you said that you like is that you can kind of be a behind the scenes person without your name out there, create a pen name and leverage the traffic and buyers that Amazon already has to make money. But to do that, the buyers have to be able to find your books. And just like, just like Google, Amazon is also a search engine, and for a customer to find your book, you have to make it easily accessible to them by targeting the right keywords that they're going to be searching for. So literally, every single person I work with, the number one thing that I always have to help them with is keywords, picking better keywords, and then sometimes, and a lot of times, is also picking poor niches as well. And

Robert Plank 31:24 that makes sense, and it just in general, it seems like, least for me, like if I'm, if I'm making, like a product, or making a blog post or something, it's like, if I, if I think it's going to be a big hit, just based on the gut feeling, it's usually not, and if I think it's the, the dumbest, most newbie type of thing that no one's gonna want, then it's, it really takes off. So, so it's like, as soon as you remove the ego out of the equation, at least for me in general, like on, I mean, in internet marketing or anything else like that, like, it's usually the opposite of what I'm expecting. So, I mean, and that's huge, yeah. And I wonder if that's just like an ego type of thing, or if they're just in a hurry or something. But I mean, that's huge. And the other thing too is, like you said, I mean, if you're building all these little Kindle books with a pen name, I mean, who cares if it's on a subject that you know or you love yourself anyway, if it's not even tech, it's not even you making it, it's the pen name, right?

Dave Koziel 32:21 Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. It's a mind thing. People. People think that they have to be an expert in the books, even though they're not writing it, and they have all these things that messes up their mindset. You literally just have to completely de attach your emotions from this and just purely think of it as this is a business. I'm trying to make money. What do I need to do to be able to make money? And if you think of it from that mindset, you're going to make the right decisions that are going to make you money. You're not going to make decisions but based upon what you like, what you what you think is the right way to do it, what you, what you think is the right way to to get into a niche, you have to follow almost like a formula and that's going to lead you to being profitable. So yes, I agree with you. And

Robert Plank 33:05 I mean, I just love this whole call because, I mean, there are a few steps and a few little tips and tricks and gotchas and things, but it seems like overall, this is a pretty dang simple formula compared to some of the other ways of making money online. So if someone was looking to get started with this whole, you know, publishing on Kindle thing, or creating a bunch of little Kindle books, and they only add maybe over the next, like, 10 or 20 minutes, even if someone was just gonna put in their first 20 minutes into this, what would you suggest they do for 20 minutes.

Dave Koziel 33:41 I think they should go to amazon.com, go to the Kindle store, go to the best sellers list, and just do research for 20 minutes. See what type of books are selling that is going to be your most important thing, identify maybe one, two or three books that are selling. Well, save them and then just study them. Study like, what did they use in their headline? What did they use in their title? What did they use in their description? What do they have on their covers? Because this is, this is literally, this isn't rocket science. All you have to do is find a book that's already selling well on Amazon and literally, kind of analyze it and pick it apart. Okay? They used this word in their title, okay. They used these words in the description. Okay, they use this type of image in their cover. And what you can even do is, if you're looking at a similar like niche, if you're in a certain category, you can compare three books together that are selling well and see what they all have in common. And then you can kind of take everything they have in common, put it in a Word document, and basically create your own version of the combination of those three books that you can then publish and sell on Amazon and will hopefully and should be able to make you money,

Robert Plank 34:48 and that right there is freaking amazing, because it sounds like because that way you're not just being a me too or a copycat. If you look at what the top three books have in common, or what jumps out of you, then you. You're creating something that's based on what's proven to sell, but it's also unique. And the thing that I keep on hearing or kind of feeling circles back around to when we first started this call, where you're mentioning the minimum viable product. And the thing that held me back for a couple years with Kindle was I didn't realize that, I didn't realize that you could edit. I just looked at people selling on Amazon, and I thought, oh, man, I got to have, like, the cover exactly right. And I got to have the price exactly right. I got to have the book exactly right. But, yeah, what's really cool about this is you can just, kind of, it seems like you can just play around, and then later on, if you want to make a better cover, make a better description, do better keywords, change up the price, you can always do any, I mean, even if you're even if the books are done. I mean, delete it or not. It seems like you can go back and do any, like, undo any mistakes later on, well, other than, like, a bad niche or a bad book. But it seems like if, if you're almost quite there, almost on the mark, but something's a little off, you can always go back and correct your mistake. Yeah, you're

Dave Koziel 36:02 absolutely right. I literally have had books and even books that are in bad niches. Sometimes you can take the content of that book and kind of turn it around a little bit to fit in another niche, and then you can use different keywords to target it, and you can make that a profitable book. I've literally had books that have tanked hardcore the first time I published them, and then I just did a complete rehaul of them, new cover, new keywords. May have done a little bit of editing to the content, new description. And then when I, when I made the update to them, they took off and started selling. So it's definitely possible to change your book as much as you want, and it's actually something that I really, really encourage unless you have a book that the first time you publish it comes out of the gate and is just rocking and rolling. As far as sales goes, you want to be tweaking your book. You want to be changing keywords. You want to be experimenting to see what works and what doesn't. Sometimes you might make a change and it might make your book so worse. Well, then you just go back in and change it back. But that's how you're going to find out what's going to work, and that's ultimately what's going to lead you to making more

Robert Plank 37:02 money. And that kind of relates to, you know, when I when I look at, for example, the books that, uh, this John Franz persona you have, or hearing you talk about these books, I mean, what always kind of hit me in the head was I kept thinking, Well, if there's a high selling book or a best selling book, and I'm going to, you know, knock them out of first place, or I'm going to try to get on that front page. I mean, how the heck am I going to do that? And how the heck isn't someone else going to knock me out of that front page? But it seems like, as you're talking about this, that a lot of these books are not made by marketers, right? Like, a lot of these books might have good content or might be okay sellers, but maybe they just lucked into it, and you can do a better job with the keywords, or just the fact that you're tested and tweaking means that you're doing a lot more than the original author of the book. Is that right?

Dave Koziel 37:53 Yeah, in a lot of ways, a lot of the people who publish on Kindle, this is just for my general observation. A lot of times, you'll see big publishing companies on there, which the only way a lot of times you can beat them by doing better keyword research and targeting better keywords. The biggest struggle that you have in trying to beat them is that they usually can get a ton of reviews, but at the same time, you can still you don't have to have more reviews than them to outrank them for whatever keywords that using for if you can even come close to it, or even sometimes have half of what they do, like, for example, if, if a big publisher published a book and has 100 reviews, and you can get your book to 50 reviews, you can sometimes still outrank them, just by using different strategies for picking keywords and your in your title, subtitle and different things With marketing to do better than them. But I think overall, that the people, the amount of people, who are doing what I do, is definitely the minority on Kindle. I think that a lot of people who publish on there are either the big time publishers or they're just kind of people who are just want to Self Publish. They're not actually marketers. They're more authors or writers who want to just put their content up there. And if you look at the best sellers list, you'll see you actually, you can actually see who the people are that are marketers. I've gotten to the point where I can go to the best sellers list, and I can tell if if someone's book is, if they're if the person who published it was another marketer like me. I can just tell by the way that they did the reviews, the way that they wrote their copy, the way that their title is, and that's important to be able to notice, too. And that comes along with experience, though.

Robert Plank 39:26 So that's funny. So you can, you can see if, like, if you're looking into a certain topic in the best sellers, if, say, you're looking at, like, 10 or 20 bucks, you can tell if they're mostly marketers or if it's all just some regular authors. That's kind of funny. Yeah,

Dave Koziel 39:41 it is kind of funny. And the thing is, you can still beat out any one of those people, even if someone else is a marketer. The experimenting that I talked about before, if you can figure out different strategies, and there's, there's so many different ways to be able to drive traffic to your books and to make money. I mean, I could, we could have a whole. Podcast even talking about that, you definitely want to prepare your books as best you can to make organic sales, one with from the buyers that Amazon already has available. But man, you can. There's so many different tactics with social media and paid traffic outside of Amazon that you can use to drive traffic and get sales from your books too. There's, there's a lot of possibilities.

Robert Plank 40:21 So speaking of those possibilities, I mean, you have, you said you had 60 to 80 books, and a lot of those are on Createspace and audible and ACX stuff like that. So what's next for you? Is it more of the same stuff, or is there something coming up that you're really excited about?

Dave Koziel 40:37 Yeah, the strategy I'm working on now is, and this is kind of advanced, so I don't recommend people start off with this, but I am actually, and we, you and I, Robert, we talked about this whenever we met up, but you can create a permanently free book on Amazon. And I'm not going to actually go into too much details about that now, but I'm, I'm at the stage where I'm actually not even worried about making money from the e book. My goal now is to make my books permanently free on Amazon, generate leads, and by generating those leads, I'm also still making sales on my paperback version and audio book version, but I'm also building up huge email lists, and I'm able to make a lot of money on the back end by promoting affiliate offers to these email list. And as a marketer, I think we both know that there's the money's in the list. And for me, I'd rather be able to send out one email to a list of a few 1000 people and make a ton of money, then try to make worry about making a few bucks on an e book that I have available for sale. So that's kind of the strategy that I'm doing that's definitely not one for beginners, but as you get more advanced, you might want to think about doing that as well, and also too. I'm offering coaching. I'm creating courses, I'm doing a lot of training that teaches other people how to do this, because there's definitely a need in the marketplace for someone who really, really has the depth of experience as I do in teaching people how to do this. Because, like you said, there's a lot of people and courses and training out there that they don't really go into the nitty gritty, like I have today that teach you how to do all this. So I'm trying to serve that customer as well as take my my publishing, what I have with my eBooks, to a different level as well, and

Robert Plank 42:18 that whole taking it to the next level. I mean, I've just seen random I randomly seen, like, different authors show a few numbers or a few screenshots here and there. And, like, some of that stuff is crazy. Like, some of these guys that make their books permanently free, I've seen some of their strategy, and they'll have like, 10 or 20 books that are, like, always free, and we'll get like, 2000 downloads a day each. And I mean, man, if you combine that and get them off of Amazon, then now it seems a lot less silly, because at first glance, you're thinking, Well, why am I going to sell a 99 cent or $3 ebook? And then I guess the short term answer is, well, who cares if it's $1 or $3 if you put 100 bucks in the little book, and it makes your 100 bucks a month back, but then now you have all this traffic. You get them on a list, you get them on these high ticket offers. You get them retargeted, you get them on coaching, all this stuff. I mean, now Amazon becomes a traffic source again. Now you're not only just living in Amazon's land, but now they're using all this huge amounts of buyer trap, even if a small amount hops off and gets on your list, then, I mean, geez. I mean, that's a huge place to get some new buyers there. So I mean, you shared a lot of cool stuff today. And I mean, do you have any, I know you have a YouTube channel and you have a blog. Do you have any URLs or resources or people can find you and check out what you're all about?

Dave Koziel 43:39 Yeah, if you're interested in getting any type of training for me, or actually, I even have a free case study. If you go to publish with dave.com that's just published with dave.com you can get my free five video case study on how I made my first $1,000 per month from publishing. And my saying is this, if you can make $1,000 per month. If you can get to that point, then you can scale to 2000 you can scale it to 4000 so I think that four figure mark, that $1,000 is the most important. So I have a free case study that you can get by just going to publish with dave.com and in your name and email address. And I also recommend checking out my youtube channel if you just go to YouTube, actually, if you just type in YouTube slash Dave coziel, or you can just go to the YouTube search engine and type in my name, Dave coziel, I literally have 50 plus videos, free videos on there that teaches you different strategies that I talked about today, and a lot more than that on how you can make money publishing ebooks.

Robert Plank 44:37 Awesome, and that's the skull cozy. That's K, O, Z, I, E,

Dave Koziel 44:42 L, is that right? Yep, that's right. Awesome. So youtube.com/dave,

Robert Plank 44:47 cozel, and then publish with dave.com I mean, man, I want to thank you so much for showing up on the call today. I mean, you've definitely opened my eyes to a whole possibility of just based like building. Up a whole new income stream. And I knew that it was pretty simple, but I didn't even know how simple, until you explain this today. And I knew that it was pretty cheap, but not even how cheap compared to all the all. I mean, just the momentum you can build up by having even just a handful of books, or 60 to 80 books, like you're talking about. So I mean, I want to thank you so much for stopping by today. Well,

Dave Koziel 45:24 thank you, Robert, for having me on and like you said, this isn't something that is super complicated to do. Anyone can do this, and you don't have to make, you know, 1020, $30,000, per month, like I did. I literally know people who make $1,000 $2,000 per month, and they're perfectly happy with that. I also know people who do this and make even more money than me, it just depends on what your preferences are, so you can get out of it as much as you want or as little as you want. So thanks again for having me on Robert definitely appreciate

Unknown Speaker 45:50 it.