Little Steps: Amazon's kindle store

Showing posts with label Amazon's kindle store. Show all posts

Thursday, April 18, 2013

What Does Many Streams Of Income Mean?

Binghamton, NY

As all my readers of this blog know, I LOVE many streams of income! In fact, that is what motivated me to start this blog in the first place. It has evolved a bit from when I first started it. Not the way I planned it from the beginning, but I like it better this way. My streams of income are doing much better now and I thought I should come back to this blog and let you know how to increase those streams.

1. Open an Amazon ProStore - Sell a product on Amazon. They get the traffic. All you have to do is list.

2. Use Fulfillment By Amazon - Send bulk amounts of products you sell to Amazon and they will send the products out for you. All you have to do is list them and send them to the warehouse. No customer service at all. No contact with the buyers. It is great if you have fast moving product!

3. Become an associate of Amazon by signing up as an affiliate. Include links to the products you think your blog readers will like or interest them. If they buy anything on Amazon after clicking that link, you will get a little bit of money. Maybe it is not much, but it adds up.

4. Be an affiliate of other networks, such as ClickBank, Shareasale and others. Or find sites that interest in that are not in those networks. Like VistaPrint or Netrition. Make sure it is something your readers are interested in.

5. Write an eBook. Yes, it is my favorite stream of income! Do you have an old book you put away because nobody would publish it? Or have a half finished novel or other book on your computer? Get to work on it and publish it in Amazon's Kindle Direct program. Money in your account while you sleep! Just keep writing more books, passive income keeps coming in.

6. Sell on eBay. Everyone does this one time or other. I like eBay and have no complaints there except I wish I could sell everything I list as soon as I list it! LOL

7. Sell a product on your website. I do this. But this is the hardest nut to crack. Pick a product to sell and sell it on your website.

8. Write blog posts for payments. Some companies are looking for bloggers to write about their products. On one of my other blogs, I write a post for a local grocery store and get paid for it. They contacted me after seeing a link to their store coming from my blog from a post I had written about shopping there. I found a wonderful eBook that tells you exactly how to do this and even gives you examples of letters to write to companies. The name of this eBook is Review Bloggers: Get Flooded with Review & Giveaway Sponsor Products written by Bethany Cousins.

So there you have it. These are my streams of income. What are your streams? Do you have some you'd like to share? If so, let me know and I will write about it or have you write a guest post for this blog.

FTC Blogging Disclosure

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

First Payment From Kindle Direct Publishing

My Homesteading Journey

I am so excited to tell you that I received my very first payment from Kindle Direct Publishing at Amazon for my eBooks! I can hardly believe it. Yes, I know I am not selling them for a lot of money, but they are selling. I have three books there and selling each one for .99. It is low enough that I figure the people who I want to reach can afford it.

The hardest part by far, was the formating it for the kindle. Right now, I have my 3rd updated copy of My Homesteading Journey up there. It still is not perfect for me. I tried to fix the problems the conversion made. I tried to make the table of content links work for the third time. They work on my computer in each format I worked on. Still doesn't work in the book. Actually, that book doesn't really need the table of content links as badly as the other two. It would have been nice though.

The other two books are cookbooks and yes, they really do need a table of content with clickable links to work. If you want to use a recipe you need to click it and go right to it. It must have something to do with the conversion is all I can see. Yet, I have bought some kindle books that have links that work and some that do not.

Other than that one issue, I have been quite pleased with my books. I have also learned to do two very important things:

Do not check the reviews on Amazon! No more, I have had two bad ones and I will no longer let the bitter tongue of someone else, affect me or my mood. My thoughts on this is that, they are just jealous because I live a life they never will, nor understand.
Do not check your sales all day long. Sometimes I even forget to do it at all. Do not let a refund of a book affect you either. If they don't like your book, it is better that they don't keep it.

If you decide to sell an eBook on Amazon, let me know and I will go check it out! I love to hear from other authors and your experiences.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Is There An eBook In Your Future?

I wrote a post on my other blog yesterday about some eBooks I had bought in the Amazon Kindle store. I read more often on my Kindle Fire than I was reading paper books. Some of the books I have been reading are about writing and it made me think I should write a post here about some of the these eBooks for the readers of this blog. I have read these and would like to share.

A mazon Kindle Freebies: How To Publish Your Kindle Book On Amazon For Free And Make Money From Home

This is the first eBook I purchased about writing after I got my new Kindle. It opened my eyes so to speak! I went right to work on changing my eBooks over to the kindle format and uploaded them on Amazon. I have sold more eBooks than I ever dreamed possible!

Your Words, Your Story
This book is a resource for new writers, but even experienced writers will get a lot out of it. The author, Cynthia Harrison, has written it as a memoir as well. I think you will get a lot out of this book. Especially for aspiring writers. She covers many writing topics, not only books, but including blogs and poetry. I enjoyed reading this book very much.

Kindle Cash - The Beginner's Guide to Creating, Marketing, And Publishing On The Amazon Kindle

This book gave me a lot of good information and I found it very useful. I have gone back to it over and over to study different chapters. Michael Masters, the author covers topics such as what to write your eBook about, how to research your keywords, writing your eBook, and marketing it. I mean he really covers everything you could possibly need to know.

Write Good or Die

This book is edited by Scott Nicholson, and consists of articles written by other authors. It is very good and full of information. They are the bare truth on writing and what these authors have experienced. Very interesting and good advice through out. Gives you a lot of inspiration.

How I Wrote My First Book: the story behind the story

This book is another that is written by other authors who share their stories with you. They tell about what they went through writing their first books. Anne K. Edwards and Lida E. Quillen edited this book. I found it interesting because sometimes you feel like you are a horrible writer and wasting your time........especially when you get a first bad review from someone who gives you a bad review because she is a school teacher, and thinks she is suppose to be grading a student's paper......not writing a review for a book she bought on Amazon! Sorry, that is what happened to me. It shows that writers have a lot in common and it seems they like to help each other. I like that.

And if you don't have a Kindle or other book reader, Amazon offers Free Kindle Reading Apps so anyone can read the books on their computers. I hope you will enjoy some of these books as much as I did. Really and truly, I am learning a lot about writing self-published books and my sales are doing fine on my own eBooks. If you have any questions I am more than happy to answer them if I can.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Information For eBook Writers

I have been receiving many emails from other writers wanting to write their own eBook. This is the way I did it. I presently use Open Office as my writing program on my computer and that is where I write my books. It is open source software, meaning it is free to download. Most people use Word as their writing program and that is what Kindle Direct Publishing recommended. Once it was written, I uploaded it as a PDF file to KDP. It seems to have worked. I have seen where others had problems with uploading the PDF file, it can also be uploaded as an html document.

One thing I always do before I start something is to research. I am always researching something. In the Kindle store on Amazon, there are many books on writing your eBook and publishing it to the Kindle. Some are good and some not so much. What I do is to read a variety of these books and then use what I want from each of them.

One of the best I read was written by the founder of Smashwords, Mark Coker. He has written an instructional manual for anyone wanting to publish an eBook. This book, Smashwords Style Guide - How to Format Your Ebook (Smashwords Guides) gave me such detail in formating my eBooks. I highly recommend it. I believe it is free in the Kindle shop and on Smashwords as well. Now I did not use it on my eBooks as I didn't read it until they were already on Amazon. I will be using it on my next one!

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