Question: Can you make money writing books on Amazon?
Answer: Yes. It is possible. People have done it before and are still doing it today.
BUT
There is no guarantee that as soon as you write a book and self-publish it on Amazon, you would make money.
Before we go further, here’s the truth. You can’t actually write books on Amazon, you can only write books and then self-publish them on Amazon via Amazon KDP or, if you’re in the US, publish them serially on Kindle Vella.
Amazon, here, is the store or shop you’re using to SELL the book.
It’s easy and takes only 24 hours to get your book published on Amazon KDP but you really do need to actually work on writing the book itself and invest the time or money to refine that book—it’s content and packaging.
Do you start making money after you publish that refined book on Amazon? Not likely.
According to this source, approximately 7500 Kindle books are published on Amazon KDP. And you can bet that there is a large number of authors that don’t actually make money publishing books on Amazon, so your book needs to STAND OUT before you can make money selling it on Amazon.
I won’t get into talking about how to make your book stand out on Amazon in this article or how much money you can make writing books on Amazon where we’d discuss stuff like the pricing dynamics of Amazon’s cut for every book you sell and how much you earn. Instead, I’ll give you an answer to your question: ‘Can you make money writing books on Amazon?’ as comprehensively as possible in the rest of this article.
Here are some of the ways you can make money writing books on Amazon:
1. You can make money writing books on Amazon by WRITING STRATEGICALLY.
How? By writing to market or trends and marketing to market or trends.
In this case, writing and marketing to market is better than writing and marketing to trends.
You don’t understand what I mean? Keep reading, I’ll show you what I mean.
What is writing to market? Writing to market is writing a book based on what you observe that readers want after studying the trends of what’s selling on Amazon.
Many writers write books based on an idea that has stuck with them, a story that they just have to share, or the solution to a problem that has yet to be solved with other books. So sometimes, asking them to write to market can be difficult, especially for newbie writers.
There is also the fact that writing to market doesn’t always work. After all, even if you do all the Amazon research in the world, you may not be able to actually catch the essence of what readers are looking for if you don’t actually read (and enjoy) books in the market or genre you want to make money writing books for.
When you write to market, marketing to market, that is, marketing to the readers and target audience you wrote for in the first place is easier. Thus, you’re more likely to make money writing books on Amazon when you write to market.
On the other hand, writing to trend can pay off but only in the short term.
When writing to trend, a writer will look at the market, analyze current trends, use those trends to make educated guesses about what readers are looking for, then write THAT book. There are many risks to writing like this because trends, unlike markets or book genres, may not last very long.
After writing to trend, you may discover that the trend you spent over a month or a few weeks writing for, has fizzled out by the time you’re done with writing that book. Thus, the book will definitely not make as much money as you expected.
Of course, there are also writers that successfully write to trend over and over and make money doing it but it’s important to remember that they are not NEWBIES.
After writing to market or trend, it is also important that you market to market or trend with the right Amazon keywords, categories, book covers, and book descriptions, among others.
And this is one of the organic ways you can make money writing books on Amazon.
2. You can make money writing books on Amazon WITH STRATEGIC SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING.
Social media marketing can be a very effective way to market your book. It can also be a time waster if you’re not strategic about it.
Strategic social media marketing involves finding out what works for other authors in your genre, trying out those things, and measuring the effectiveness and performance until you find the social media marketing efforts or content that work for you and your book(s).
If you’re just casually doing social media marketing for your books without measuring what works or doesn’t, you will end up wasting a lot of the time you could have spent writing a new book.
3. You can make money writing books on Amazon WITH ORGANIC MARKETING EFFORTS.
Organic marketing efforts include email marketing, search engine optimization, and building an audience for your author brand or books with free channels like Youtube, podcasts, blogs, and social media accounts.
With the right organic marketing efforts and strategies tailored to your author brand and your books, you can sell more books on Amazon.
4. You can make money writing books on Amazon WITH PAID MARKETING EFFORTS
Using paid marketing efforts like Amazon ads, Facebook Ads, or Bookbub ads (for fiction), you can pay a certain amount, which is the cost per result or action, for each reader you send to your books.
I don’t recommend this for a newbie, especially one who doesn’t have real experience with paid BOOK marketing. It’s advisable that you don’t start using paid ads to SELL your books on Amazon when you’re just starting out especially if you’ve not broken even on the cost of actually producing the book.
5. You can make money writing books on Amazon IF YOU ALREADY HAVE AN AUDIENCE.
For example, someone with a successful Youtube channel, podcast, blog, or an engaged social media following will most likely sell copies of their books to a good percentage of their audience if the book was written specifically for that audience.
Another example, specifically for fiction authors, is if you have gathered a sizeable number of readers on free reading platforms like Wattpad or Inkitt, you can convert a small percentage of that audience to book buyers.
But for a newbie with no audience, you can only make money writing books on Amazon if you’re in it for the long haul and you’re ready to work hard on marketing your book inside Amazon with the right Amazon categories, keywords, book covers, and book descriptions, and outside Amazon by talking about your book to the right audience organically or with paid marketing efforts.
6. You can make money writing books on Amazon BY WRITING MORE BOOKS.
There is a popular Facebook group, which I’m a member of, called 20 Books to 50k.
The essence of this Facebook group’s name is that the more books you write, the more money you will make writing books.
Frankly, I subscribe strongly to this idea as a fiction author because it’s not very cost-effective to write one book and then start putting in all your marketing efforts to sell it.
Let’s look at it this way. If you have 5 books: 2 standalone novels and a trilogy. It’s possible that someone who read and enjoyed one of your standalone novels would try reading another one of your books and may end up buying all your books.
How cost-effective was that? If you used an Amazon ad to send that person to that standalone novel at $1, you have definitely made a lot from that reader who bought all the other books.
Of course, this doesn’t always happen but it’s just a perfect example of the scenario of writing more books and building a large backlist to make a living writing books.
Final Thoughts
There’s more to making money writing books on Amazon. This blog post was just to answer the question of whether you can make money writing books on Amazon or not but it doesn’t actually tell you how to make money writing books on Amazon. If you’re interested in such topics, you can leave a comment and we’ll push that up on our list of articles to write.
Otherwise, you can consider all that has been said in this article and think carefully about whether you want to make money writing books on Amazon. And if you’re willing to do all it takes, get started writing and refining that book so you can strategically sell it on Amazon.
