Kindle Direct Publishing Paperback - How To Self Publish A Paperback Book On Amazon

About this video

In this interview, recorded after the two met on Clubhouse, Cindy recounts her path into online selling. She says she worked 13 years as a software engineer on the space station project at McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing, where she met her husband, then left in 2002 after a high-risk pregnancy with monoamniotic twins. As an avid scrapbooker she started a scrapbooking business for twins because, she says, no twin products existed, discovered CafePress and sold twin-related shirts and mugs, was recruited to Zazzle, later ran a photography business, then returned to print on demand through Merch by Amazon and discovered KDP through merch groups. She criticizes CafePress’s compensation change — she says sellers kept their set amount only on direct store sales but got about 20 cents on marketplace-search sales — and says she still receives small monthly amounts from CafePress and Zazzle despite not uploading in about a decade. On KDP, she says the early guru advice to slap a t-shirt design on a lined journal cover failed, so she used her Photoshop and software background to build a tool that automatically repeated a targeted interior page across 100 pages, which became the basis of her tool business; her first highly targeted book sold in its first week. Her central advice is to start from a customer avatar: know exactly who a book is for and what problem it solves, which she says makes keywords, covers, and interiors much easier. She favors medium-content books that help people solve problems, using soap making as an example, and describes pairing a how-to ebook on Kindle Unlimited containing links to the related paperback — she says Book Report data shows borrows followed days later by paperback sales — and using ebook links as lead magnets to collect emails Amazon does not share. For beginners she advises against single lined journals, which she calls completely saturated, and instead starting with a topic you know, are passionate about, or want to learn, researching the niche deeply through groups and search.

Key takeaways

• Start from a customer avatar: who the book is for and what problem it solves
• Avoid saturated single lined journals; build targeted, useful interiors
• Pair a Kindle Unlimited how-to ebook with links to the related paperback
• Expand a selling niche with different book types or sub-niches, not duplicate interiors
• Run ads only on best sellers, test a few weeks, then leave winners running

Episode details: published March 12, 2021 · 26:23 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are RJ Martinez’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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