I haven’t been posting regularly to my blog recently. My excuse is that I have had (and still have) so many ” making money online from home” things going on that writing blog posts has had to take a back seat for a while.

I have been trying to get my new squeeze funnel together, getting new sales copy for my detox ebook, getting a Kindle book created, working on my Green Organics business and organizing a party for my big ?O birthday. (No, I am not telling you which one., a woman has to have some secrets!)

I know that’s far too many things to be doing at one time but for various reasons too boring to go into here,  that’s the way it worked out. One project that I have at last finished is to publish an ebook on Kindle. It’s called
“How To Thin Legs: Get Thinner Thighs And Slim Calves Fast”

There has been so much about making money on the internet with Kindle books in the past few months that I got bitten by the bug. Now, I am wondering if it was such a good idea because so many people have jumped on this bandwagon that there is very fierce competition.

At one time marketers were saying that the great thing about Amazon was that they did all the SEO and marketing for you. Now, they are saying that because of the competition you need to be promoting your book yourself if you want your sales to take off.

Keyword Research

After doing some initial research I decided on the keyword “How To Thin Legs”. Originally I got the idea from a topic in a Women’s magazine.

I went straight over to Google’s Keyword tool and discovered there were 60,000 searches for that particular keyword and also a good number of searches for related keywords like thin thighs, thin ankles and thin/slim calves.

There were only a couple of other books on the subject but I was not sure if I had discovered an untapped niche or that it was not a good one.

I decided that I had to give it a go. Nothing ventured nothing gained as they say. It would be good experience if nothing else.

Outsourcing

I outsourced the creation of the book, the cover design,  and the conversion to the mobi file that you need for Kindle.

I posted the job to Guru, oDesk and vWorkers ( formerly Rentacoder). I had heard a lot of marketers say that you get better writers on Elance and Guru but I have used oDesk a lot and am familiar with the way it works so posted there as well.  I didn’t find vWorker very user friendly.

I chose an ebook writer on Guru in the end but was not happy with the result. She came from an English speaking country and had good feedback for similar projects but there was a lot of peculiar language and padding in the book she produced.

I have heard that some writers outsource the jobs they take so I did wonder if she outsourced it.It took me some time to go through it all and highlight the areas that needed editing.

Even after she made the changes I still had to do a lot more editing to make it read well. It took up a lot of my time. Perhaps I should have rejected it. You learn these things by experience.

I decided to publish this book under a pen name as I am already known for my detox ebook and I want to keep my own name for publishing books related to detox, cleansing and health.

Marketing my Kindle book

By all accounts the creation and publication was the easy part. The marketing is the difficult part.

I have bought a few WSO’s on Kindle, joined a few Kindle Forums, a Kindle Facebook group and a Kindle publishing membership site called Apex Authors run by Kindle authors John S. Rhodes and Jay Boyer.

I am soaking up and implementing stuff I am learning to get this book off the ground before getting the next one created.

I have priced it very low to start with to get some sales and hopefully some good reviews. One of the advantages of belonging to a forum or group is that you can ask people to review your book.

Some authors have enrolled their books in the Kindle Select Program where they give Amazon the rights for a period of 90 days to sell their book and offer it in their lending library for which they get a small payback.

I have read various opinions on this and have decided not to enroll my book in KDP Select.

If I do it means I cannot upload my book to any other publishing platform for the 90 days and that is what I want to do next.

It’s all a bit of a learning curve but I hope it will pay off in the end.  Now I must finish my other making money online from home projects!

Do you have any books on Kindle? Do you have any marketing tips you would like to share?  If so, please leave them in the comments.