Jun 16, 2020
On this episode of Quiet Light, we talk with Joe and Mike Brusca.
We discuss Ecommerce and how they built an Amazon publishing
business. It’s a really interesting look at one Ecommerce business
model and how it works. Tune in to hear us discuss the right and
wrong way to drive traffic and why their business is such a
success. Topics:
- How they got their start during the “wild west” period of
Ecommerce.
- How to structure your business when you get paid “per page
reads”.
- The Right Way and The Wrong Way to drive traffic.
- Building an algorithm-proof business.
- The “right” types of books.
- Delayed profitability and building your back-catalogue.
- How Joe and Mike are planning their eventual exit.
- The four pillars of value.
Transcription: Joe: One of the
cool things about what we do, Mark, is that we're exposed to so
many different business models. There are a million ways to make a
living both on and offline. You can do all sorts of things offline,
but online, it's not just writing content and producing affiliate
revenues or building a brand and selling it on Shopify or
e-commerce or building on a SaaS business. And we have the luxury
and privilege of talking to so many people and learning what they
do and how they do it and how they make money. There's not just one
model for everyone. And you had Joe and Mike Brusca, is that how
you pronounce the last name?
Mark: I believe so.
Joe: On building an Amazon publishing business to
sell. And, I talked to somebody a year or so ago that did a similar
thing and wanted to sell. And unfortunately, folks, he didn't have
his numbers together. He didn't have any financials. He just had a
lot of high-level details and it's not something we thought we
could sell because we want to protect both the buyer and the
seller. In this case, these guys were doing a very similar thing;
building out a lot of content through actually having books
published and earning revenue off of that. How did that call go?
Mark: It was fascinating. I mean like you said, we
get the chance to see different people's business models and look
they made no allusions to anything other than the fact that they
are looking to build this business and eventually sell it, which is
where it became a really interesting conversation for me to have.
There are so many different business models out there and we know
most of them that exist, right? There’s SaaS, there's content,
there's drop shipping and e-commerce in general but what they've
started is a publishing business and leveraging a different part of
Amazon, which is really how Amazon got to start and that is their
publishing and selling of books. We dug into what that business
model looks like; how are they making money from selling Amazon
Books and primarily, this is where their difference is, right?
They’re not just selling books for the face value of $10 to
download this Kindle book but they're utilizing Kindle Free Time,
which is an Amazon-specific program that's generating, frankly,
quite a bit of money. In fact, they mentioned the best month so far
is $25,000 in a single month of revenue for content that once it's
built, it's built and it's ready to go and their back catalog
perpetuates itself.
Joe: That's called cash flow
folks. If you're building a product business, you're constantly
putting money in inventory as the business grows. That's a
beautiful model.
Mark: These guys are classic
Internet entrepreneurs. They've sold a few dropship businesses in
the past. They have some other e-commerce businesses that they're
building to sell as well. So if anything else, this is just a
fascinating conversation about building a business that maybe you
don't know exists out there. I didn't really know much about this
and I'll confess after this I spent about half an hour researching
what the top books and the Kindle Free Time library are on Amazon
just to see is this something that anybody can do. And I think it
is something anybody can do but if you enjoy kind of digging into
somebody's business models, these guys are incredibly open about
what they're doing and how they're doing it. They do have a
coaching program and that was one of the things that they wanted to
come out for the podcast but there certainly wasn't a sales pitch
for that. This is more just kind of exposing what they're doing. I
asked them some tough questions as well, and I think they
appreciated the fact that I didn't just throw softballs. I wanted
to really challenge them a little bit on this concept and what
they're doing and just interesting stuff.
Joe:
Yeah, I'm looking forward to listening to it. Before we go there,
folks, this is part of what we do at Quiet Light. We try to bring
interesting guests on to help you learn different business models
and different ways to earn a living and build a better business. If
you've got a story that you want to share where you think you can
help the Quiet Light audience, remember reach out to myself or
Mark. You can reach us at
joe@quietlightbrokerage.com
or
mark@quietlightbrokerage.com
and let us know what your story is that you want to share, how you
can help folks, and possibly we'll be able to get you on the show
as a guest. With that, let's go to the podcast.
Mark: All right, guys, I'm excited to have two
entrepreneurs on this week's podcast in a little bit of a different
spin on online businesses; an area that I haven't explored very
much but is growing very quickly. And I'm interested in, first of
all, this business model in general because I see it as a
potentially interesting opportunity, but also in maybe some
applications that we can leverage this type of business for. But in
order to do that, we kind of have to dig into what is this whole
niche and this whole industry that's kind of springing up. And so
with that in mind, I have Joe and Michael on the line here on the
podcast. Guys, thanks for coming on, I really appreciate having you
here. Why don't we just go ahead and if you could just introduce
yourselves real quickly and let us know who you are?
Joe: Cool. Thanks for having us, Mark. And we're
Joe and Mike. We're brothers. Joe Brusca, Mike Brusca, and we're
from BuildAssetsOnline.com. We've been doing online business since
around 2014. It’s kind of when we got started. We had regular jobs
and all that, and then we ended up and somehow fell into building
online businesses. And, one of the first online businesses that we
ever did was publishing books on Amazon Kindle. And when we first
started it, it was a bit of a Wild West situation where it was kind
of new and Amazon didn't really have their stuff figured out yet
and a lot of people were exploiting the systems and their platform
wasn't really fully evolved but now it's turned into a really
viable long term business model. And in these past few years, we've
kind of put together a process that allows us to build and make
royalties pretty much on autopilot. And we've seen in the past few
years some of these Kindle businesses sell for over a million
dollars. We haven't sold ours yet but, yeah we're going to talk
about that because it really is a great business model; very, very
easy to do, very straightforward, and once you get it going, very
passive.
Mark: All right so you guys are selling
Kindle books. Is that correct?
Mike: Yes. We're
selling Kindle books and like Joe said, it kind of fits into anyone
who has an online business portfolio. It is a really great option
to have because it's probably one of the most passive models that
there is where there is royalties and so it's definitely a unique
form of diversification. We've sold drop shipping businesses, we’ve
dabbled in affiliate websites and so we've kind of seen the entire
breadth of online businesses that you can do and it's definitely
one that we are putting extra energy into long-term.
Mark: Now, I want to dig into this a bit more,
because I'll be honest, when you guys first approached me about
talking about this on the podcast and everything else I was like
Kindle, okay, sounds fine, whatever, it doesn't really fit with
what we normally talk here but then when you started to get into
some of the details, it was interesting just as far as what you're
doing, you're getting royalties for these books, but it's not
necessarily you just going on Amazon, listing a book for sale, and
then selling it because obviously, that would be; I know a lot of
people who have had published books that went up on Amazon and
didn't do much there. Maybe they've sold a few and everything, but
nothing to write home about. You guys are now talking about selling
this for millions of dollars so there's obviously a twist here. I'd
love to dig in a little bit deeper here into this. What are you
guys doing that might be different from the guy who signs up with
XYZ Publishing Company and they add the Kindle book and then they
might sell 100 or 500 copies of their e-book?
Mike: The main difference is that we're creating
our own publishing company and what we're selling is essentially
publication company or that pen name. And so we're going out and
we're making these books under specific pen names, and it's all
with the purpose of generating an audience. So like you said, you
can put a book out there on Kindle and nothing's going to happen.
What you need to actually focus on is building that brand. And so
that pen name becomes a brand just like any other Clorox or
whatever brand you could think of that people buy in private
equity. It's kind of the same thing. So you're creating these
digital products under this pen name. You're developing an email
list. You're developing an author website. You can even put your
books on ACX, which is Amazon's that's how you get on audible, so
it's an Amazon company. And so, you have the Kindle version, the
paperback version, and the audiobook version. You're doing this
with the whole purpose of generating just a big customer base and
that is really where the asset lies.
Mark: When
you're putting these up for sale are you getting money from the
direct purchase of these books; how are you generating revenue from
these?
Mike: So you get money from the direct
purchase of the books. But Amazon also offers something really
unique, and that's the Kindle Unlimited program. So there's a huge
readership for fiction books and so Amazon wants to accommodate
this. And so what they do is for $50 a month or whatever it is now,
you can sign up to what's called Kindle Unlimited and you basically
can read as many books as you want throughout the month. And so any
book that's enrolled into the Kindle Unlimited program, you can
download it for free. The way that the publisher gets paid through
that is by the amount of pages that get read. And so doing fiction
books it's even more advantageous because you can publish
novel-length books or you've probably experienced with any show
that you've watched once you start watching an episode, you're
going to go back through the entire back catalog. And so that's
what we're trying to capitalize on in order to get the most page
reads.
Mark: Okay, so the model here is Kindle
Unlimited, you get paid per page read so, therefore, you're wanting
to create content that is going to be an easy page-turner, as it
were, right? I'm not going to publish some Academia throw it up on
Kindle Unlimited and do very well with that sort of approach,
right?
Mike: Correct. And yeah if you're doing
something maybe non-fiction or something more academic, it may
serve you better just to have it as a straight purchase option. So,
9.99 or even though we sell books at 2.99 those books can actually
still do really well as long as they're part of a bigger catalog
because people will decide to buy that book. So we kind of employ
that as a strategy. We mix, regular sales with Kindle Unlimited,
but Kindle Unlimited still makes up probably 80% of the income.
Mark: Okay. Now, you guys have built an entire
business around this. I'd love to dig into a little bit longer. How
long have you been doing this?
Mike: So we started
it back in 2015. Joe, did you want to say something there?
Joe: No, I was going to say 2015, but it's evolved
a lot over time like I was kind of alluding to earlier. And I think
we only may have resumed it. We kind of took a little bit of a
hiatus when we started getting into other online businesses. We're
mainly working with building high ticket drop shipping stores and
building affiliate sites and content sites. So we kind of took a
little bit of a hiatus but then I think around two years ago is
when we really got back into Kindle; when we kind of saw that
Amazon was really improving the platform and there were there was
actually a lot of potential to build a long term business on it
because like I mentioned earlier, it is kind people have been
publishing on Kindle for a long time but in our opinion two years
ago, that was really when it became the most viable thing to do
long term and that's when we kind of start seeing these types of
businesses pop up for sale.
Mark: Yeah. So you got
started at 2015 so about five years ago, but really in earnest over
the past two years and would have spent some of those iterations
over the years with the things that you've had to do to adjust to
make this into an actual business.
Joe: So I do
want to clarify that over that kind of three-year hiatus of not
doing a lot of publishing, we were still actually making money. So
we're talking no hours a month into this business and it was still
bringing in, probably a five-figure outcome each year. So, again,
it's really something that's super passive, especially once you do
it right. But we were doing things that; basically Amazon has an
algorithm and so when you put out a book, you want to get us as
high in the algorithm as possible. You want to get that
best-selling status or you want to do something to have people on
Amazon find you. And so that was kind of the intention in the
beginning. It was more focused on like you said you’re storing the
books on Amazon and seeing what would happen. And so that's kind of
how we started out doing it. We weren't doing any of this actual
brand building or email list-focused marketing and stuff that. And
like Joe said Amazon was kind of like the Wild Wild West, there
weren't a lot of rules in place, people were kind of exploiting
those rules. And then Amazon began to crack down on that in 2016
and they're always kind of tweaking the algorithm and trying to
make things more of a level playing field and just encourage
certain behaviors. So over time, the trend has really gone in the
direction of having your own external traffic source that you can
drive to Amazon and so they reward you for that. And your reward is
increased exposure on Amazon so you get that internal traffic. But.
If you're actually getting good books and you're focusing on
building a brand, these people will come off of Amazon onto your
list, and the cycle kind of repeats itself.
Mark:
All right. So I’m getting the general idea for it. You've got into
a little bit as far as if you do things right, which is a loaded
phrase; I mean you guys have doing this now for five years and if
you do things right is the result of a five-year process of
tweaking and figuring things out. Let's first start though with
doing things wrong where it is just throwing it up on Amazon and
hoping and praying which is no different than selling a product on
Amazon. You throw something up on Amazon hope and pray, you're not
going to have much success. You need to have a plan. So what are
some of the wrong approaches and then what are some of the right
approaches on starting up a Kindle business that can be a sellable
asset in the future?
Joe: Well, when we first
started doing it. Yeah, like you said we were just throwing books
on Amazon but the thing is we weren't really writing the type of
books that we're writing now. So when I say writing, I mean
publishing, because we don't actually write the books. But yeah, it
was more about just; back then, Amazon's algorithm really rewarded
more so than it does now things that were new. So if you put a new
book up with the right keywords, even though it was a short book,
as long as it was keyworded right it would show up in the right
categories but now it's not really like that. So when we say the
right way and the wrong way, that's pretty much the wrong way
because it doesn't really work anymore. But it did work at a time
and you can kind of see this and it makes sense from Amazon's
perspective, is that they want that external traffic. I mean,
they're always trying to drive people to Amazon and that's what
they reward now. So the wrong way to do is it's at a different time
and just taking advantage of how the algorithm was back then. But I
don't really see it going back to that direction because like Mike
said, it's been moving in the direction that we're talking about
now, which is the right way for some time now.
Mark: Okay, go ahead, Mike.
Mike:
Yeah. If I could just add one thing, really, what we've, kind of
waited all those years to serve and hone in on now in terms of
doing things the right way, is building the business back up in a
way that's algorithm proof so that if we're throwing all these
books on Amazon and they change something it doesn't completely
destroy our business. So now when you have your own readership off
of Amazon, it's kind of a win-win relationship for both platforms;
good books, people enjoy reading them so they come kind of into
your sphere but you give that back to Amazon and they reward you.
Mark: Right. Yeah, I mean, it's no big shocker
that Amazon likes it when you send traffic over to them. I mean,
that's kind of a rule of Amazon, you want to play well with them,
send them traffic. So let's actually dissect some of this here. And
you talked about the right type of books, the wrong type of books,
and then we've also talked about building traffic, and we've also
talked about publishing these books. So there are three loaded
questions in here which is what are the right type of books number
one, and what are the wrong type of books and then second of all
would be okay, drive traffic; how? What does that look like? Build
a brand is easier to say, it’s three words, doing that is no easy
task. Building up a following of people is always difficult. And
then the third question is writing these things; how do you get
them written? So these are all big topics and I don't want to throw
them all at you at once so let's go ahead and start with that first
one. What are the right type of books, what are the wrong type of
books, and what are the books that you just have no idea if it's
right or wrong?
Mike: Yeah, and to be clear, we
hate platitude as well so I don't want to just linger there. So the
right types of books would be; like I was saying before you get
paid based on page reads. Back in the day, people used to just draw
up short books just to kind of; you're kind of throwing as many
pieces of bait out there, seeing if one rises to the top and then
just kind of going from there. Now we publish books that are
usually 30,000 words in length at least so that would be considered
novel-length. People would go all the way up to 80,000 words and
more and so we say that the right type of book has to be a length
that readers can enjoy nut it also has to be a book that is written
towards what the market is already demanding. And so what does that
mean again? You actually need to do your research and go on Amazon
and see; you’d have a very, very keen eye as to the trends that are
going on; what types of covers are there, are there any
similarities in the covers, any similarities in the titles, going
through some of the content of the books? You're trying to pinpoint
what it is that readers actually enjoy. And so by doing that,
you're more likely to get better conversions, more read-throughs,
more people actually subscribing to your email list, and that's
what we mean by the right book. And so then you're talking about
driving traffic. So it's like we said when people find you and they
enjoy your books you can get them off Amazon by giving them say
like a free book if they subscribe to your list. And so now you
build up a readership. And there's also a lot of other websites
where you go and collaborate with other authors and kind of do list
swaps. So you're building yourself up that way and so external
traffic with Kindle is always about the list. But also, you can
take that and say even put it onto Facebook by doing something like
a look-a-like audience and now you can kind of ramp up more traffic
to Amazon. And a lot of times you do it with the purpose of, again,
giving them more referral traffic so they can boost you higher in
the algorithm. Yeah, there's other ways to capitalize on it as well
by making your own publishing website or you're own author website
doing things like blogging there to get traffic. And now, again,
you have that audience pixeled, you can use them to drive traffic
to Amazon.
Mark: Right. Okay, so from your guys
perspective and I'm not going to ask you to open up all the doors
of your P&Ls historically here but when we're talking about
building a network and building a brand and everything, there's a
lot of expenses associated with this. So you talked a little bit
about the passive revenue, which is great, people love passive
revenue. But what goes on behind the scenes? I looked at ads and
sites before where somebody fills up an ad on-site and they’re like
look at this thing it's generating $10,000 a month in passive
income. But what they didn't show you is the $150,000 they spent on
content and link building over the past year. And so you're like,
okay, you're just getting started now you sure hope that that lasts
for you. You guys seem to have the sort of cost of authors which we
need to talk about at some point; how do you find the writers and
how do they get compensated and then also building up this
audience? Well, what does this look like from an expense standpoint
compared to what you get from Amazon? I would assume profitable
otherwise you wouldn't be talking about this but what are we
looking at here?
Mike: Well, I would say there's
really two paths you can go down. So we talked about you can use
Facebook and drive traffic that way and that would be more of a
kind of accelerated approach to trying to get quicker earnings on
Amazon. Or you can do more of a slow and steady approach, which is
kind of what we do with a little bit of Facebook ads. So what this
means is just consistent but relatively low cost. Just say okay,
I'm going to invest in a book a month and if you're just consistent
with that, say it costs you 500 to 800 bucks a month for all your
expenses, your book cover, editing, whatever. Obviously, when you
put that first book out, you're not going to be profitable
immediately. You have to also do some list building expenses,
maybe. But over time, over the course of a few months, you start to
build up quickly. Okay, now I’m making $20 a day, now I’m making
$30 a day. And so it's really a snowball effect as you build up
that back catalog, as you gain more followers. And so now once you
have a bigger following, you put a book out and then you get a
return on that book pretty quickly.
Joe: It's
nothing like you illustrated with that ad sense example. So, again,
I don't really have the numbers in front of me, but I can give you
a rough estimate. So I think it was a few months ago when we
usually make between; so there's a few months ago where we made
over $26,000 in royalties and we probably got one book published
that month where we spent the $500 to $800 and we probably spent
3,000 or 4,000 in Facebook ads that month. That's a rough estimate
of what you would see typically. But again, it varies because
sometimes you're not always heavily promoting on Facebook.
Depending on what month it is, maybe you put out two books but we
tend to put out one book a month. But, yeah, that's generally what
it looks like for us now. When you're getting started, it's
obviously going to be slower. But I've made affiliate sites and I
made sites that rely on SEO and link building and the expenses are
nowhere near that, not even in the same ballpark.
Mark: Okay, you guys lost me a little bit here.
$500 to $800, write a 30,000 plus word book, I mean, I pay $500 for
a single blog post on our site. So let's talk a little about
sourcing authors, I know you guys are in the fiction space here,
are fiction writers that much more willing to write for $800 or
$500 or what's going on behind the scenes there?
Mike: Yeah. So it's definitely a bit of a
different market than getting a blog post written or even a
nonfiction book because there's really no research involved. It’s
just kind of a creative process. So comparing it at a cent per word
basis, it's going to be a lot lower. And there are people that
invest more into that, there are people that invest less. But what
we found is honestly as long as the books are good then people will
read them, the audience response to them well. We've kind of gotten
to a nice, sweet spot there where you can invest more and maybe
that has a better return; I don't know, we haven't really
experimented too much but yeah, that's really you can certainly go
on Upwork or even Craigslist we found writers or you could probably
go on Indeed and find writers. But it's not an uncommon rate to
spend say two cents a word or even less on a fiction book.
Joe: To write a blog post for your company, Mark,
I mean that's a lot more expertise required than writing a fiction
book for sure. And fiction writers, think about it in terms of
rarity; how many people love reading fiction, love writing fiction
compared to how many people have any sort of knowledge about online
business. I mean, the supply and demand there is just totally,
totally different.
Mark: Do you guys read the
books that you publish?
Mike: In the beginning, I
did. I was kind of bootstrapping it but these days no, we just kind
of; I mean, I'll read samples like if I'm hiring someone new just
so I can evaluate if they're actually good at writing. But no, it's
just they send it in, it goes to the editor, get the cover design,
put it together, send it out. And so if there was any real issues
we also have an advanced reader team so they get the book as well
to write reviews because Amazon actually does allow you to give
away your book for reviews. Right now at 2020 in May they allow it.
And that is because it's a very common practice in fiction. You
give people the book early to let you know how it is. You can't do
that with a physical product. So it actually allows you; it's much
easier to develop that social proof and you also are not giving
away all of your 20, hundred thousand units to get reviews back
like with FBA.
Mark: Right, because it's a virtual
product at the end of the day. I want to backtrack a little bit
because I've had this nagging question my head. You talked about
the number of page reads, they pay on the number of pages read,
they're not looking at the furthest amount that you've gone in the
book but actual time spent on each page is that right? Do you know?
Mike: I don’t know their exact process, but I
would say it's kind of a combination of both. I mean, there's
probably a number of time that they spend on a page for it to count
and then it would be the amount of pages that they actually read
for that number of seconds.
Mark: Yeah, because my
shortcut got to cheat the system mind was thinking, oh man, what
you did to choose your own adventure, you could get them to go all
over the book and…
Joe: Do you remember when I was
talking about the Wild Wild West?
Mark: Yeah.
Joe: I mean that's the kind of stuff that was
going on. So they've spent a lot of time on perfecting and tweaking
that algorithm.
Mark: You're telling me that
Amazon is smarter than me.
Joe: Well, I'm just
saying you were…
Mike: Maybe they were not really
paying attention and what people were doing was; so they actually
have a cap now on how long the book can technically be. So even if
a book is 100,000 pages Amazon will only count it up to 3,000
pages. So what people were doing was they're really abusing the
system, they will just fill these books with just the most random
things and they would have these books that were so long and then
they would have something like to win a free prize just click to
the back and then boom, they would make 150 bucks.
Mark: Right.
Mike: That was part
of the reason…
Joe: I got a lot of trouble for
that.
Mike: Yeah. That was part of the reason why
we walked away from it actually was because it was almost like if
you think about professional sports, everyone is taking steroids so
in order to even compete because page reads wards you in the
algorithm so you'd have these random books in the best-selling
things; this is way back in the day so we never did anything crazy
like that but it just seemed too; it was between doing stuff like
that or not doing stuff like that and we did it. We always thought
it was risky to go crazy abusing the system like that so that was
one of the reasons why we kind of took a little bit of a hiatus
until things evened out.
Mark: Right. Okay, well
before listeners wonder how far off track we're going to go from
our core type of topics here, this is fascinating, I could talk
about this all day. I think this is interesting. You guys are
building this publishing business with an eye towards someday
potentially exiting as well. I'd like to get into some of the
things that you guys are doing internally to maybe plan for that.
What discussions have you had internally about that? And I'm
hitting you out of left field on this. We didn't prep for this
before the call so understandably if you don't have ready-made
answers, that's fine but have you guys discussed buildings up for
sale and what sort of things have you done to maybe have an eye
towards that potential exit someday?
Mike: So
really, the main thing that we've done to kind of have it focused
on exit is to focus on having that separate publishing site. So
that way we're really establishing ourselves as a brand. We're not
just getting income just from these royalties. We actually get
affiliate commissions. We have visitors that come to the website
and then buy the books. And so, yeah, it's kind of we focused on
what can we do off of Amazon like we kind of touched upon it's good
to do that for the algorithm and just for your own sake but it
actually does help kind of diversify what we're doing and make
things a lot better when it comes down to selling it. I don't know
if you have any insight there.
Mark: So we have a
very simple framework that we call the four pillars of value; it's
the risk of your business, the growth potential, the
transferability, and the documentation. So building up a brand is
key; it helps protect against the risk and it's also aiding towards
the transferability of the business, which is something that we
would definitely encourage. Joe, were you going to say something on
top of that?
Joe: Yeah, I was going to say as far
as the documentation goes, because I feel maybe that's what you're
asking. Maybe I'm wrong, but the documentation is not really
complex at all. If we were to put together something for someone
that we're handing off the business to we would probably just give
them; we have like an education course on this subject, but we
would just give them that. But it's really just not complicated at
all. It's not like handing off an e-commerce store to someone or
even an Amazon affiliate site to someone that knows nothing about
SEO or WordPress or something like that. When I say it's simpler,
it's much, much simpler.
Mark: Right. Yeah,
absolutely. It reminds me a lot of the ads on publishing days, but
through a more established platform of Amazon and utilizing that
program. It isn’t known much is my guess. Have you guys looked
into; I know you're working mainly in the fiction field, have you
played around in nonfiction? Because when we first talked about
this, my head sort of went to what if we were to leverage this
along with our existing business and add it as a revenue stream
there? Your paid on a number of pages read, I’m not sure if you can
create cliffhangers at the end of a chapter of a business book so
much like is this P&L going to get murdered in the next
chapter? I don't know. We'll see. What have you guys done, if
anything, in that realm of nonfiction books or have you played with
it at all and have you thought about using it with an existing
business; you have drop shipping businesses on what you're your
drop shipping but is there a potential play there, in your opinion?
Joe: Well, we have done nonfiction before. When I
first started publishing kind of similar books online, it wasn't
Kindle, it was Create Space and it eventually merged, and Create
Space became Kindle Paperback or whatever they call it. But at that
time, I first started doing coloring books and we've done puzzle
books and stuff like that. So I think that would be also classified
as non-fiction. So I think there definitely is a play there to do
that kind of stuff. And again, because that's something you can
also build a brand around in the paperback space and you wouldn't
approach it the same like we're talking about now with the page
read and stuff like that. You'll have to put every book on Kindle
Unlimited. It just really depends on the sector of books that
you're going after. But as far as what you're saying I think it
really is more of a; I guess any book on Amazon would probably be
more B2C stuff. I can't imagine a B2B play in this area. There are
people that sell non-fiction B2B stuff, but I don't know if it
would be a great use of time for a company yours, for
example. I don't know. I don't really think so.
Mike: What I would say is I wouldn't recommend
doing that for the purpose of making money on Kindle. But the point
is that by publishing a Kindle book, you're tapping into that
audience and you're tapping into the organic traffic already on
Kindle. So you're not going to make your money on page reads and
you probably shouldn't be focused on making your money on sales
either. What you should be focused on is putting up a good book
that way it's almost like lead generation; the Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, I believe, think about
how many millions of dollars off of Amazon that probably makes him
just by building up his name because it's been an Amazon bestseller
for who knows how long. So, yeah, when you're doing a non-fiction
book on Amazon for business or for something like that you need to
keep in mind kind of the back end funnel and it should be more of a
complement to your business rather than the business itself.
Mark: Right. Absolutely. And that's kind of what
I'm getting at, right? I mean, any sort of content marketing play,
in general, is just that, right? We bring a lot of content on the
Quiet Light Brokerage blog, we have a podcast, I don't sell
advertisements on the podcast even though we have a decent
listenership. I don't sell ads on or put ads on the blog or ad
thrive or anything like that because that's not the main goal. The
goal is to build that audience. Although, if there was a way like
with Kindle Unlimited it seems kind of a nice backdoor to make a
little bit of money, I just don't know what the payouts are on
that. How many books do you think you need out of a portfolio to be
able to turn decent amounts of money; more than just 30 bucks a day
or so? I can't imagine one book unless it’s top of Amazon is going
to turn in that much money on Kindle Unlimited, I would imagine you
need to have a portfolio of books.
Mike: Yeah. And
I'd say we were kind of familiar with how to do things already
because we were doing them in 2015 so we were able to start
profiting really within a couple of months. And it does build but
it's a lot easier to scale as well because if you're publishing one
book a month and you want to do better, publish two books a month.
So, yeah, it's hard to say how much you're going to make because it
comes down to the execution of it. If you have a really good book
that just takes off in the algorithm, if you do the Facebook ads
right, and you can really have a pick-up steam then you can make a
lot of more money off one book. And it also obviously depends on
the length of it as well; so the term how much one customer can
kind of give you off that one book. But, yeah, you'd be surprised
honestly. Some books can take off and really, really do well. We've
only been doing this kind of new way for two years I guess this
month and we've really seen it grow quickly and it grows
exponentially.
Mark: Interesting.
Joe: Yeah, and keep in mind that getting into the
Kindle top 100 of all the Kindle store, which we have done; getting
into top 100 is way different than getting into the top 1000. The
top 1000 is still really good but once you break into the top 100,
it just; like Mike said, the book would just take off in terms of
page reads and everything. So that's something else to consider, is
that you have the slow and steady approach and maybe you never have
anything that breaks in the top 100 but with the slow and steady
approach as that back catalog builds, it doesn't matter. So that is
there is a variable there if the book takes off or not. Now, I
think if you do it correctly, every book should do decent but like
I said, top 1000, top 100, totally different ball games.
Mark: Joe, I asked you this when we talked a week
ago or so, why share this information? I'm loving the discussion.
I'm super entertained. Hopefully, people listening are entertained
as well. What are you guys sharing this information for? It seems
like you guys would want to be just kind of be like hey, don't come
in here. Don't do it. I don't want to compete against you.
Joe: Well, actually to be fully transparent we do
sell a course on how to start a Kindle publishing business; Passive
Publishing Profits. You check it at BuildAssetsOnline.com. But the
other thing is the reason why we started doing education in the
first place is the guy that told us to do it, he basically said
it's a great way to leverage your success. And we have a lot of
different online businesses like we've talked about but the thing
is, is we might not want to grow these businesses into
billion-dollar companies because we enjoy the lifestyle. Me and
Mike, we just work from home and we think that the courses are not
so much a detriment, but a great compliment as well; teaching other
people and getting paid for that. But you also have to keep in mind
that especially with Kindle, we encourage our students that you're
not competing against one another, because like Mike mentioned
earlier, there's this factor of swaps and things like that. So
these people who read fiction books, they are really, really avid
readers and so if you're partnering with other publishers like we
encourage and like we do in our community, it's a win-win for
everyone. There's no doubt about that. And taking that back to even
selling education products in general, I mean, it's been an amazing
experience for us. I'm sure we've generated some competition for
ourselves in some way but I think the amount of partnership we've
made and things like that far, far outweigh the cons there.
Mark: Yeah, fascinating. Well, I'm always a fan of
transparency. I mean, that's the only way to do business and I
appreciate that as well and it's linked to really fascinating
stuff. Guys, I know we're up against the clock here. I've been
talking for about 40 minutes; just a little bit more on that so is
there anything else that you would like to cut around the
discussion with anything that we didn't cover that you're like man,
why hasn't he asked this question?
Joe: I don't
feel that way. I think you did a good job of really trying to
hammer in and have us explain ourselves.
Mark: Hey
that definitely makes you my favorite guests. You said I did a
great job.
Joe: Well, not every show does that, to
be honest with you. I mean sometimes; I guess we feel leaving a
little bit empty because we didn't get asked the deep questions
that force us to be on our toes. I definitely got that with this
one.
Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Well, guys, I
appreciate you reaching out. I appreciate you coming on here;
really interesting stuff. I'd be lying if I said I'm not going to
go on Amazon and take a look at the top 100 on Kindle and see what
type of books are there. And there’s no time for me to jump on
another project but that doesn't mean that my entrepreneurial
wandering eye isn't going to spend a little bit time looking at
that. So I appreciate you guys coming on. I really enjoyed the
conversation.
Mike &
Joe: Thank
you, Mark.
Resources:
Joe and Mike’s Website Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com
