370 – Kindle is a super great business opportunity: Tom talks Kindle Ebook Questions

Episode 370 – Kindle Ebook Questions
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode three hundred and seventy of Screw the commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about Kindle e-book questions. I've be getting a lot of questions about Amazon's Kindle e-book and how it can help your business. And I really feel it's one of the best business opportunities out there, but only if you know the tricks of the trade. I just did a three hour and 40 minute master class that had a bunch of over the shoulder videos showing you exactly how to reap the benefits of the power of Amazon. If you want to get the replay of the class and all the videos, visit screwthecommute.com/Kindlemasterclass. We'll have that in the show notes. I hope you didn't miss episode 369. We had Lisa Stuart. Oh man. She was a she's an attorney and author and empower of women, a mom of three and I call her my new supermodel friend. All right. Now if you'd like to hear your own voice on screw the commute. Wow. If the shows helped you out at all in your business or give the ideas that help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail, click on it, talking to your phone or computer and tell me how the show has helped you. And and hey, remember to put your website on there, too, so you can get a great big shout out in your voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute.

[00:02:04] All right. Make sure you grab a copy of our automation ebook. This has made me grab customers because people are too slow to get back to them. I'm lightning fast responding to people and oh my God, say we it out one time it saved me seven and a half million keystrokes over the years. Just one of the tips in this book. So grab it at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And we also have a podcast app over there. It's great to put on your cell phone and tablet to take us with you on the road, save your favorite episodes in the podcast when you get a call and then start right back up. It does all kinds of cool stuff, so grab a copy of that along with we got complete instructions on how to use it at screwthecommute.com/app.

[00:02:56] All right. I know we're still in the middle of this pandemic. People don't know what to do with Lockdown, not Lockdown. Send the kids to school. Oh, no, we got a message. Don't send them to school. Send half of them to school. Oh, my goodness. It's crazy out there. But my me and my students don't really have to deal with these kinds of things, maybe with the kids.

[00:03:18] But we don't have to worry about finances because we're able to sell online from home. And I have been preaching this for twenty two years, been selling myself for 26 years online. And it's the greatest business I've ever been in and the forty four years I've been in business. And you can make this happen for your children. You can get them entrepreneurial training that's in high demand so you don't mortgage your house to have you have four year college that has them working at Starbucks when they graduate because they have no skills.

[00:03:55] The skills that we teach in my school were in super high demand. Every business on Earth needs these skills and they're happy to give money to your child or to you to provide these services. And you can start your own business. And we also teach you how to make your own products and services. So it's my school, is it? I am Tikvah Dog. It's the only license dedicated Internet marketing school in the country, probably the world. And it's licensed to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education, Virginia, but its distance learning. So not only can you learn from home, you can legitimately work from home. And there's nothing like a pandemic to show you how important that is. All right, check it out. It's at IMTCVA.org and a little later I'll tell you how you can get a scholarship to that school if you're in my mentor program.

[00:04:51] All right, let's get to the main event. I did a big Kindle e-book master class the other day and there are a lot of questions about how to create a Kindle e-book and how to use it to promote your business. That's why I did The Masterclass, because I get so many questions about this. So. I'm going to give you some questions and answer now, that'll be our episode for today.

[00:05:10] So one of the questions I get is how many pages should your ebook be? All right. Well, first of all, that's kind of telling me you don't really know much about Kindle e-books because Kindle e-books don't have page numbers.

[00:05:25] Well, why is that? Well, because you they're called reflow about books. That means that you can change the font size, which, you know, if you change the font size, it changes the page length and all that.

[00:05:39] So they have like position indicators in a Kindle ebook.

[00:05:45] There are some things crazy, you know, deep things you have to know about pages. But no, it's not. You don't have to worry about it. Now, the other thing about pages in e-books, I want you to make e-books that are so great that people can't believe they got so much value for so little money. That's the way you think about e-books. If you just keep loading in great stuff into it, the pages will take care of themselves. Now, the only caveat I'll say there is if you have a really, really short document, don't call it a book. Call it a special report called a white paper. You can sell those on on Kindle. But if you call it a book and it's only, you know, very, very short, you will get immediately you'll immediately get bad reviews and then the whole project is screwed.

[00:06:37] All right. So don't do that. Make your book so great that people will buy them just because your name's on it, because you get a reputation of providing great value. All right, let's see who is the publisher. Well, you are the publisher.

[00:06:52] Amazon technically is making this available to you for free, I might add.

[00:06:57] It cost you absolutely nothing to sell intellectual property on on Amazon.

[00:07:03] I mean, they take a percentage of the sale. That's kind of how it works. But you you are the publisher, so put your name on it.

[00:07:11] I have an imprint I call anchor publishing. You know, it's still me, you know, so. So you are the publisher. All right, next question I get is, can I sell or can I promote affiliate products with these books? Answer is yes and answer. You got to do it correctly or you won't even get your book approved. Say affiliate links are weird looking. They're long and they got AF equals and then your ID and other just a bunch of stuff in it. Well, those won't get approved. See, Amazon Kindle cleaned up its act in the in the beginning days. It was just a nightmare. People were doing everything under the sun, you know, stealing your book, putting the new cover on it, putting it back up and selling it. I mean, all that's been cleaned up years ago. But they're there against affiliate lengths because they want a good experience for the reader. Now, here's the tip. And I went in great depth in this in the master class.

[00:08:14] But the thing is, is you don't want to put a weird looking affiliate link in a Kindle book because it won't even get approved.

[00:08:21] You're just wasting your time. So what you do is you make a normal looking link to your website. And then you put the affiliate link on your website, so now when the approval people look at your book, it doesn't look like a weird affiliate link. It just looks like a link to your Web site, which it is. And there's other benefits of that to.

[00:08:44] In that if the affiliate goes out of business or turns out to be a jerk. All these books that you've sold can be updated because you just update your Web page and put a new affiliate on there.

[00:08:59] And you can say something like, folks, yeah, I'm glad you came from my book, but the place I was telling you about went out of business, so I found a new place to provide the widgets and click here to check them out. So now all the books you've sold prior to that company going out of business are are technically updated, even though you haven't touched them.

[00:09:21] You just updated your own Web page. So that's a big benefit of putting a normal looking link.

[00:09:28] And the normal looking link will get approved where the affiliate link will not.

[00:09:33] So those are benefits of four affiliate marketers. OK, next is how do people find my book? Well, it's critical. You know, I've been harping on key words forever. I highly suggest you go to Episode one, the second half of Episode one is all about keyword research. And then I updated it on Episode one hundred and thirty because of voice search. See people search differently on their cell phones and tablets than they do by just typing stuff in. So you need to know both.

[00:10:10] But how are you found? Well, the biggest ways you're found on a Kindle ebook is. These keywords must be in the title, the subtitle and the book description. Those are the biggest, biggest, baddest places to put your key words. Also, what category you you choose and also in the master class. I don't have time to go into it now or I mean, it's a little bit complicated, but most people think, oh, I'm only allowed two categories. No, you're allowed ten categories, but you got to know how to get all 10 categories. And so I show you on The Master.

[00:10:50] You know, because we we do screen captures and all this, it's a three hour and 40 minute webinar, all with every tip and trick you can think of to to do well with Kindle eBooks, because if you just do the Kindle e-book, yeah, you can do it.

[00:11:06] But, you know, just sit there in oblivion because nobody will ever find you. So title, subtitle, description and categories are the main places. And then I also talk about the different promotional things that Amazon provides for you. And it's dirt cheap. I mean, you talk about a bargain on advertising. You can be right at the top with your book for pennies, you know, so it's a paper click thing. So it's a great deal right now.

[00:11:33] And I go into that a little bit on the masterclass. All right, now.

[00:11:37] Next question. Let's say, wouldn't I be better off using all the different e-book formats?

[00:11:43] Well, in my opinion, my not so humble opinion, I might add.

[00:11:48] Ok, his is no, there's a lot of reports that say that Amazon Kindle is like 83 percent of the entire market. And you might say, well, you know, what about that other, you know, 17 percent?

[00:12:06] Well, I'm saying that the deals that and the opportunities that Kendall gives you. Far outweigh the 17 percent of other people you might be missing. All right, let me explain that. There's a program in Kindle called KDP Select. Kindle Direct Publishing is KDP. And they will give your book away for five days out of every 90. But you have to make it exclusive to Amazon to have this deal. And you say, well, what's the big deal? I give my book away for free and I won't make any money. No, my whole philosophy of this three hour and 40 minute masterclass is that your book should lead to more expensive stuff, either affiliate products or your products and services. So they gave away twenty five hundred copies of one of my books in five days and that turned into a six thousand dollar a year income. Now think about this. Amazon promoted my book. They didn't make a nickel on it and I get six thousand dollars a year and it's increasing. So, I mean, come on, folks, how could you get anything better than that? So I suggest that you just stick with Amazon also. It's going to be way easier because they have this software they give you to create the books in the early days. That was such a hassle. I didn't want to do it very much because there was too much hassle to format the book. But now they have this software they give you to do it. So it cost you absolutely nothing. Plus, the book cover you can make right inside Kindle or with other free software that we go into on the new master. So, no, I don't believe you'd be better off with that 17 percent of other formats where it's just a big hassle. They don't have any of these programs the Kindle has. So that's my two cents.

[00:14:10] All right, next question, I have a bunch of different topics, but I'm working in a sensitive job and don't want my name out there for some of my off the wall topics. What should I do? All right. Well, there's a thing called a nom de plume. I don't know how you pronounce it for sure, but it's basically a pen name. And now Amazon calls it a pseudonym.

[00:14:35] So you just put another name on it. Yeah. You still have your real name on your account, but nobody that sees your book has any idea who it really is and is perfectly legitimate. This isn't black hat stuff. You can have a pen name. You can have, I think three or five or something. I don't know. I have one. You can do that. No problem. So use a pen name. All right, next question, I have heard you could read and listen to the book somehow at the same time. Oh, man, this is a really interesting thing. So this is called WhisperSync.

[00:15:11] And that means that you could be let's say you're reading your book at home before work. And of course, hopefully you're not going to work because you listen to me and you screwed the commute, but all right, let's say you're let's say you're you're reading your book in the morning and then you got to go to the dentist later, OK? That's better than going to work. Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I still think going to the dentist is better than going to work. OK, so you're reading your book and you get time to leave for the dentist and it's a 20 minute drive. So wherever you stopped reading your book, if you're in this Whisper Sync program.

[00:15:55] You can listen to your book in the car right where you left off reading it, I don't know, it's like magic or something, right? And then when you get to the dentist, they're not ready for you. So you could be reading your book again, right where you left off listening to it. OK, now from you, the creators point of view, you have to have a Kindle ebook and then you have to have an audio version where you have read or a narrator has read your book. Now, Kindle now owns Audible. So not only can you sell it directly in Audible, you can be in this whisper sync program. So they buy your book, they pay extra for the audio and then they listen to them together. Or they can just buy the book themselves or the audio themselves. All right. So I said this. These kind of programs aren't available other places. So so, yes, you can do that. So there's a lot of great things that you can do by having a Kindle ebook, and it cost you absolutely nothing.

[00:17:01] Now, if you want to spend some money on development, you can get a narrator to narrated the audio book, or you can you can get, you know, pay editors and proofreaders if you're really going all out. You could pay a book designer, cover designer if you wanted so you could spend a lot of money on it if you wanted to. But I'll tell you what, most of the people I know don't they do the entire thing for free with all these tools that you have available.

[00:17:29] So if you're interested in this, get by master class, go to screwthecommute.com/kindlemasterclass and check it out. Now, if you want help on all of this kind of stuff that it takes to be successful online, then check out greatInternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:17:57] It's my mentor program. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in this field. And I always dare people to pull another program and let's go compare them. And nobody's got the guts to do it because mine has so many unique features. It's one on one training with me and my whole staff will take over your computer, show you where to click. It's an immersion weekend at the retreat center where you actually live in this big state home for an immersion weekend. And then we take you to our TV studio next door and shoot marketing videos for you. Yeah, we just all this stuff. And then if you're in that program, you get a scholarship to my school that you can use yourself for extra training or gift to someone. So all these things are crazy. But listen to this.

[00:18:53] You know, I try to turn the guru world on its head for Internet marketing back about twenty years ago, because people at my level were charging 50 or 100 bucks to teach you this stuff.

[00:19:04] I mean, fifty or one hundred thousand bucks. Excuse me. So so I said, you know, these are a lot of these people are rip offs. And and so I charge an entry fee and then a percentage of your profits that's capped. So you're not stuck with me forever.

[00:19:20] And you also know I won't disappear on you because I won't get my big money. All right. So for me to get my fifty thousand, you have to make two hundred thousand while people love this and seventeen hundred plus students later, it's still going strong.

[00:19:35] So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And hey, we got a master class coming up a webinar. This is the master class. It's a complimentary webinar all about audio books.

[00:19:52] And it's another guy I know, Derek Doepker. And it's coming up like either tonight or tomorrow. I'm not sure. I have to talk to him to make sure we can fit it in either tonight or tomorrow. So check it out. Watch your email.

[00:20:08] If you're not on my email list, get on my email list. I send that great stuff. I mean, amazing stuff. And you you know, if you get that free book I told you through the screwthecommute.com/automatefree, you'll be on my email list because you have to opt in to get it.

[00:20:23] All right. We'll check y'all on the next episode about audiobooks. Catch ya later.

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