How I Lost 25K Hiring Ghostwriters for KDP
My sister called me one day and said what do you think of this course? She was a marketing director for the entrepreneurial ‘Girls Building Empires’ Instagram at the time that had a whopping 2 million followers.
She showed me course that they were pitched to promote and I loved the idea. Fiction Profits Academy was the exact course, but this isn’t to bash the course. I thought it was a good course honestly and it seemed that many were having success from the screenshots in their FB group.
I was never a writer or even interested in writing for that matter, but this had my wheels turnin.
Brilliant, I thought.
Hire ghostwriters to write me some stories and make passive income for years to come, simple enough, right?
I stumbled upon the ‘clean romance’ niche… don’t ask me how, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever read a clean romance book myself but there I was attempting to sell them.
As instructed in the course, I headed to Upwork to find and hire expert writers.
We got to work and were pumping out some books, but it didn’t take long for me to realize I was spending a LOT more than I was making.
I kept at it, even hired my sister to help edit my books and made a deal to split the profits we make. I would do the marketing, email list and uploading to KDP. My sister on the other hand, was in charge of hiring writers, editing their work and providing final manuscripts ready to be uploaded.
We thought for sure we were going to make it and we kept at it for a whole year. Here’s what our catalog looked like after one full year of creating books on Kindle Direct Publishing.
Not bad right? That’s what we thought… but despite the reviews and the apparent success on the outside, here’s what our sales were on the inside.
Okay, so sales weren’t too great, but we were still making something. But the problem was, the amount we were spending per month to make the books FAR outweighted what our earnings were and the gap wasn’t closing by much. So, we essentially ran out of budget to continue making the books.
January 2023 our spending was close to $5,000 for writers alone. This figure didn’t include making covers, email lists, marketing, social media managers or software costs, which probably would’ve added about $600 more for the monthly expenses.
Why did we keep going? Ah, good question… I wish I knew!
There were a couple ‘competitors’ in our niche that make an estimated 6 figures per month and we felt like if they could do it we can too, we’ve just gotta keep going.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
What Did I Learn From KDP?
I like to think of things as experiments. I’m never afraid to try something, so I generally give myself a budget and an adequate timeline to see if I can move the needle at all.
I don’t think of it as a failure, instead I look at what I’ve learned from my experience. Here’s my biggest takeaways:
- Check your sales vs spending weekly. Make adjustments as needed, but you may need to kill the experiement sooner than you’d like if it’s not sustainable.
- Stick to what you know. I didn’t know clean romance, nor did I particularly love writing there. My audience was 60 year old women who are pretty particular about what they’re reading. As the marketer and blurb writer, I had a hard time connecting the dots here.
- Could I have used AI to outline books and save money? I’m not completely sure, but if I were to do it all over again I’d definitely look into it. My guess is many authors on KDP are using it already, especially ones that aren’t real writers.
So, can you make money on KDP in 2024? Yep, sure can and honestly, many are. For me, I ended up losing about $25,000 in total before I hung up the towel. I’ve concluded my KDP experiment and will continually be showing my other attempts at making money online here on Introverted Millionaire.
Keep following for more.
To your success,
Introverted Millionaire XO
