What I learned from self-publishing an Amazon Best-Seller
In 2017 I quit my job as a product designer to work on my own products full time. I had a list of problems I’d like to solve and the first product was a book helping product designers prepare for job interviews and practice their skills beyond aesthetics.
I published the book 4.5 months later and since then this book —
- Made me a living from day 1.
- Became an Amazon Best-Seller in UX and Web Design categories.
- Has been read by professionals working in companies like Apple, Google, Airbnb, Dropbox, Adobe, Uber, etc.
- Has been read by students at MIT, Berkley, UCLA, Stanford, Cornell University, University of Washington and tens of others. In some of them, professors recommend my book to their students. Considering I’ve never went to university myself this is very exciting for me.
- Receives 1–2 messages per week from readers about how helpful the book is for their career.
- Is the only self-published book that is sold so successfully on Amazon in my category.
- Reached out by the biggest publishing house for tech literature to publish my current or next book through them.
Why I wrote this article
I put a lot of time into researching different aspects of self publishing and also learned a lot in retrospective after publishing the book. I think that sharing some of my learnings, insights and numbers could give a glimpse into the behind-the-scene of book publishing. I also would like to show anyone who considers writing a book that it’s possible to make a living from self-publishing without funding or big starting capital.
In addition, I just launched my second book and while writing it I wanted to reflect and remind myself about the lessons I learned publishing my first book, which I did with this article.
Why many non-fiction books consist of 80% fluff
For these authors, publishing a book is usually a part of a bigger strategy where the book helps them to position themselves as thought-leaders and build a personal brand. As a result, their goal is to profit from the book in an indirect way — increase their consulting fees, organise workshops, perform conference talks, etc.
It means that this author’s initial goal is to write a book and not to provide value. That’s why there are so many non-fiction books that have 1–2 valuable main messages blown up to a 300-pages book because otherwise it won’t get published.
I personally didn’t want to dedicate my career to consulting or giving talks on conferences, but rather to create value and ideally get paid for the time I invested creating it. And the right format to package the value happened to be a book.
I believe that it helped me to make my book so actionable with a high signal/noise ratio. I believe that was one of the main contributors to its success and for many organic purchases through recommendations.
Publishing a book was never easier than now
The entry barrier for publishing a book was never lower than today. If you self-publish, you don’t need anyone’s approval to publish a book today. Anyone can publish a book on Amazon. There are services that are affordable and accessible and that will help you solve all of the aspects publishers solve for authors — printing, shipping, collecting payments, hiring an editor, designing the cover, sales, and distribution. I will talk about some of these aspects later.
In my opinion, the main reason to still go with a publisher is their ability to distribute the book more effectively. Publishers pay authors about 7–15% royalties from the book sales. It means that it makes sense to go with a publisher if you believe they will be able to sell x10 books than without them.
Today books are printed on-demand
I didn’t know this before writing my own book, but today many books are printed on-demand (POD). You can even print automatically via Amazon after each purchase of your book which will be transparent for you as an author. PODs have distributed printers around the world so each book will be printed at the closest location to the customer and automatically shipped. Printing via Amazon will also make them Prime-eligible.
All that means that there are no up-front costs and no expenses on books stock storage as it was in the past. This reduces the entry barrier for new small authors while serving perfectly Amazon’s long-tail strategy.
These are the printing costs for my 150-pages book on-demand on a black-and-white paper:
- Amazon — $2.72
- Lulu Express (selling via my book’s website) — $3.60
Working with an editor
An editor helps to make sure your book is clear, structured correctly, and mistake-free. For me, it was a no-brainer that I needed an editor and a proofreader as a non-native speaker. After working with an editor I understood how much better the outcome is than without them, so even if I’d be a native speaker I’d definitely still hire one.
My editor returned my first 20,000 words manuscript with 3,591 fixes or comments. 25% of the overall time spent on the content of the book was editing, and it was totally worth it.
Editors work only with DOC-files since they have the most advanced tracking features. So in case you’re not using Word/Pages to write the book (writers use Scrivener or Ulysses) you’ll have to export it to DOC and then import it back to your tool after editing is done for export purposes.
There is a dedicated marketplace for finding professionals to help you publish a book called Reedsy. Editing and proofreading my book (150 pages) cost $1000. This included, besides the book, also a press-release and a landing page. (I assume the price would be lower if I’d be a native speaker.)
(I worked with Sarah in case you’re looking for an editor, I’d recommend working with her.)
Positioning
I believe that the right positioning is probably the single most important thing that affected the trajectory of the book towards success (even more than high-quality content).
My goal with this book was to make product designers less obsessed about aesthetics and more mindful about the business goals their organisations are trying to solve when hiring them.
If I’d write a book to teach designers about the business side of their work, I’d have to educate them about such need first and that I’m the right person to teach them that.
What I did instead was that I thought of what can be the angle through which designers would love to learn about such approach, and where is the most critical for them. The answer is — job interviews. Best companies are testing how mindful designers are about the audience, business objectives, metrics and so on during job interviews. I had had a first-hand experience in that by interviewing product designers at my last job.
More than that, there were already successful books preparing other professionals like developers and product managers for job interviews. My bet was that if it works for other professions, chances that it works for product designers are high.
If you’d like to learn more about positioning I’d recommend reading Obviously Awesome.
Start with “Why”
Amazon starts working on new products by writing a press release. They call this approach “working backward”.
I use a similar approach to writing. I started writing my book with the “Why I wrote this book” chapter. I also did it with this article and I am doing the same with my upcoming book.
Such an approach really helps to align not just the intention but also the content, the marketing and the distribution of the book.
Check how many sales any book on Amazon has
Each book on Amazon has a public “Amazon Best Seller Rank” which is an overall rating among all books on Amazon. By having access to sales information for some books you can reverse engineer how many copies a book is selling.
Here are two calculators doing that — TCK Publishing and Kindlepreneur. Neither of them calculated correctly my sales (some of the data is 50% off), but they can give you a sense of it.
After playing with it, my main takeaway was that most of the books that seem to be killing it weren’t actually selling as much as I’d expect.
How much % Amazon take
Here is a simplified list of how much authors selling books on Amazon earn:
- Paperback: 60% of the price minus printing costs.
- Kindle (for a book priced between $2.99–9.99): 70%
- Kindle (for a book priced below $2.99 or above $9.99): 35% (!)
The latter is the reason why I decided not to sell via Kindle and sell a digital version only via my website, since I’d receive only 35% of each sale.
Update: it seems like Amazon removed the pricing bracket for Kindle, so an author with Kindle-books of any price will earn 35%-70% depending on the country it’s sold in.
Earn with Amazon Affiliate selling your own product
Surprisingly, Amazon’s Affiliate program allows placing links to your own product sold on Amazon. So by putting a link on my book’s website to the book’s page on Amazon, I was earning about 5–7% of the total cart summary price made by customers who clicked the link.
But even more surprisingly, Amazon does not allow to use their logo for linking to the product. Since my website included “Available on Amazon” link with the Amazon’s logo, my account was closed shortly after my launch 🤷🏻♂️ Since my launch had had a big spike in sales I was lucky that Amazon paid me everything I had made up until account closure, which ended up being $380.
Publishing on Amazon could give you a card on Google
At some point Google added my book to the Knowledge Graph, which means it would display my book’s information on the right sidebar when googled. It also included the author’s name. I clicked on it and found out that they had also created a Knowledge Graph entity and showed a card about me when anyone googles my name!
Unfortunately, as random the creation of this entity was, after a year their algorithm apparently changed and now when googling my name, a random information from one of the projects I published on Dribble is displayed next to my name 🤷♂️
File formats are hell
While working on the book, I totally underestimated how messy format compatibility is.
After I had the final content of the book, it took me several days to just export it to different formats like ePUB, PDF, Kindle, etc. I tried Pages and the industry standard tool for writers — Scrivener. Both of them had different issues I struggled to debug — the app would crash while exporting without further information, the table of content or images wouldn’t be exported correctly, etc.
The only reason my book is not on Apple Books is that I didn’t manage to export it to a file they would accept. Even hiring someone on Fiverr who does file conversion didn’t help.
If you’re looking for a problem to build a product around, solve the book formats export and I’ll happily pay you to do this process for my new book.
Why book covers are screaming at you
The main goal of the cover is to sell, which means — grabbing your attention and representing the name of the book. In the world when books are optimized for Amazon this is even taken to a more extreme. The cover will mostly appear in a small preview when the person looking at it has a low attention span and overwhelmed by the variety.
That’s why many covers have just a huge type with the name of the logo with high-contrast colors. Realizing that made me update my cover from a subtle (but more visually pleasing) version to more attention-grabbing one:
Everything is harder outside of the US
If you’re not based in the US, publishing a book is 2x more complicated. Being not in the European Union / Canada/Australia makes it x3 harder.
Here are some examples of the complexities of being based in Israel:
- Withhold tax collected by Amazon. Amazon collects a withhold tax at some countries outside of the US. For Israel, it was 30% of the sales made via Amazon.com. Since I had to pay a personal income tax after this 30% it meant that I’d earn much up to 30% less than if I’d be in the US or Germany, for example.
- No wire transfers supported by Amazon to some countries. This means that each month Amazon mailed me 4 separate checks (one for each currency) that had to be deposited in my bank branch manually by a person. It meant huge fees, times spent, and open for human error (once four of my checks were deposited to a wrong account which took endless phone calls and visits to the bank spread on a 5 month period to fix).
- Multiple vendors just to be able to accept payments. Accepting international credit cards in Israel on my website meant hooking up several middle-man solutions (as a result = higher overhead, setup time and fees)
- Two-week waiting time to receive a proof copy of the book (since there was no Amazon in Israel).
Becoming Amazon Best Seller is easier than it might seem
Amazon’s Best-Seller badge is given per category. It means that if you really want to get one, you can strategically aim to a very low-competitive category and by selling just 3–5 copies per day you could get the Best Seller badge. The final decision to which category your book belongs will be by Amazon, but you can suggest when publishing your book.
The next day after the launch a friend texted me “congrats on becoming best-seller”. I thought he was joking and only answered “haha thanks”, but later that day I actually realized my book had received a Best-Seller badge on Amazon together with a “#1 New Release” badge. My book was in a medium-competitive category, but since during the launch I sold 584 print copies on Amazon on the first two weeks, such spike brought my book to the top of its categories.
The “#1 Best Seller” badge is displayed only when the book is #1 in the category. It’s hard to maintain first place in the category for a long time, but luckily my book stays on “Best Sellers” page in both of my categories since it was launched.
When your content is pirated
Here are three cases of how my book was pirated:
- Reddit — someone on Reddit asked if anyone had a PDF of my book and another person posted a link to a copy of my book on their Google Drive. Unfortunately this thread was on the front page of google search results for the name of my book, something I didn’t know about for about 4 months 😢 Luckily I’m not the first person who’s copyright is violated via Google Drive, so Google has a dedicated DMCA-form for copyright-owners whose content was illegally spread via Drive. It took just a day or two to remove the content.
- Scribd — I was a Scribd paying customer myself and when I searched for my book there I, unfortunately, found it. Someone uploaded a PDF version of it and made it public. It had 800+ reads by the time I filed a DMCA-request on their website which took a couple of days to take action.
- People sharing the book privately with their colleagues/friends (which violates the license). There is not much that could be done in this case. A week ago a reader asked for a refund because she found the book in her company’s digital library, even though this company never bought it from me 😊
My lesson is to look for pirated sources more often, so I can remove them quickly.
Self-publishing a book takes twice longer than authors expect
Many articles I read about self-publishing said that it takes twice longer to self publish than what you would normally plan. Even though I’m proud of it, it took me just 4.5 months from the first line written to the launch; it was very true in my case.
Only half of that time was spent on writing, the rest is editing, building the website, figuring out Amazon and payments, etc.
Here is the full timeline:
- 3 month — writing
- 3 weeks — editing
- 1 week — editing, second round
- 2 weeks — formatting, launch preparations, bureaucracy, waiting for Amazon to deliver the proofread.
My new book
My new book is available for pre-order. It will teach you how to generate product ideas for your next business, side-project or indie startup.
I’ve built 17 highly actionable frameworks and mental models anyone can follow to find product ideas.
