Earn $2K-$10K+ Monthly in Publishing or Get Free Coaching Until You Succeed

Hey, everybody. How you doing? This is James. I'm meeting here with Nick DeFabio. I'm not heard back from him for a couple of hours. I said, hey, excited to talk. So he may be a no-show. If he's a no-show, we will reschedule with him because I'm really excited about this one. I'll leave his info. I'll give him just a couple minutes here as well. I just didn't want to leave you guys hanging, hang out with you guys while we're waiting. It's always fun. You know, I actually like if there happens to be a miscommunication or a misschedule or something, because then I can just hang out with you guys. Let me know in the comments if you have anything in particular you want to talk about. Let me see. OK, Nick, he hearted at 132. So hopefully we didn't get a time confusion. That often happens when you're scheduling things on different sides of the world. But I'm very excited about Kindle Direct Publishing. I'm also going to have Dr. David on to talk about what he's doing with Kindle Direct Publishing. They have two very different approaches to it. But I love Kindle Direct Publishing because it's a side hustle. Nick is here. Awesome. I thought I was going to just hang out with you guys. No, Nick is here. So I'll let him explain what he does. He will do it much better than I ever could. So give me one second here. While we're waiting, hit the like button. Hey, guys, hit like. And if you have questions, have you ever tried Kindle Direct Publishing or anything like that? Traditional publishing? We have any traditional publishers out there? Let me know in the comments. Would love to just see. Do you guys like writing? Do you use AI for your writing? Let me know your experience. Let's bring on Nick here. Nick, how are you doing? I'm amazing. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for joining me here today. This is actually the first time me and Nick have talked. We've talked over Twitter, but this is the first time face to face live. I love it. Just jumping right into it. So, Nick, I think you've probably checked out some of my stuff, but my audience is looking for ways to make extra money. So when I see all your tweets out there and it's you tweet about things that I know very little about. So rather than me trying to learn and making making stuff up, I just thought, let's bring Nick on and talk about what he does and then people will know. So let's go ahead and start with an introduction. Nick, tell us a little bit about yourself as we're getting started here. Man. Yeah. So first of all, thanks so much for having me. And my goal here is sort of provide as much insight and value as I possibly can. So the best place to start with is probably the fact that I was one of those people that had like, you know, 30 jobs, but like 30 years old or something like that. Like I was just like I go to a job, I get bored of it after six months and look and look to move on. So I ended up in a job that was like a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift for on for off. But those four on were brutal. Like you were up for two, three, four in the morning. I think I had maybe two 30 minute breaks if I was lucky. And I think they've changed that since then at that role. But I remember thinking myself, man, this this sucks, like this is not going to be sustainable. So I had a friend actually who was making about three grand a month from Kindle Publishing. And I was like, my goodness, I might as well been like 300 grand a month. So I was just like, let me let me find out how you're doing this. And I was like, OK, you know, I like books, this idea of like making royalties. And while you're not working sounds really interesting. So I just started I kind of just dove in. I dove in on my four days off that I had, which I was fortunate back then I wasn't married and have kids. So I had the ability to just kind of dive in and learn as I go. Made every mistake in the book, every mistake in the book, you know, publish some really low quality things at the beginning. And then after I would say probably the better part of a year, I would say that's one thing about me is I'm persistent, persistent. So after about the better part of a year, it kind of clicked. OK, you know, focus on quality, focus on reader experience, find the profitable niches. And yeah, from from there, I was able to just continue to build and build and build. And then it seemed like, you know, each year it got better and better to the point where it actually got a little boring because publishing is a little bit of a lonely, lonely business. So that's what's kind of brought me into sort of this sort of education space. Awesome. I love it. So is this what you're doing full time now? So you're totally out of other stuff. This is it. Yeah, this is it. I really I'm really enjoying it. I'm really enjoying helping people sort of build their publishing businesses, which is like it's very important to see them have the same success or on path the same success that I've had here. Awesome. Yeah. And that's what we're that's what we have you here. I love what you said at the beginning. You made a lot of mistakes starting. So that's why we bring people on is because, you know, we can take the machete and go through the jungle ourselves or we can go through a path that's already been paved. And that's what I'm hoping to do with you. So when you talk about Kindle Direct Publishing, maybe let's start with can you explain what that is? Some people I know what it is. I've looked into it quite a bit, but some people they may have never heard about that. Can you kind of explain what you're talking about? Yeah. Kindle Direct Publishing is basically an opportunity to self-publish your books on Amazon's platform. Right. So we all know how massive Amazon is in terms of the amount of monthly viewers, the amount of people that basically have given Amazon their credit card to charge. Right. So what we're doing here as self-publishers is we're publishing e-books, paperbacks, hardcover, publishing audio books as well. And we're just going direct. Right. We're going direct to the source. People are looking for these books, looking for this content and basically cutting out the middleman, if you will, when it comes to these publishing press companies. So it's much more direct approach. Oftentimes, it's much more profitable, much more control. You can decide on how your cover looks and you decide on the formatting of your book. And you basically are the one that is the person behind how this book is going to turn out. And that's essentially what Amazon KDP is. Okay. Yeah. And I love KDP because traditionally, if you wanted to publish something and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know anything about publishing. So I'm just I'm guessing on some of this. But if you traditionally want to publish a book, first off, you have to find a publisher. There's going to be a bunch of upfront expenses. They're not going to cover your costs usually. So you have to first convince them you have a good book. Then you're going to have to pay them a big chunk of money. Then you put the book together and it might end up being a year or more before you actually see any revenue from this book. So there's a big capital requirement upfront. And then once it's published, it's sometimes hard to get it in front of people. But Kindle Direct Publishing kind of takes both of those things out. First off, there's no upfront costs. You can publish something just from a PDF that you've written yourself. And there's also an automatic marketplace for it. So you're automatically on Amazon. So it really kills those two. What other benefits do you see to this format over traditional publishing? Yeah, spot on spot on. I think the biggest one you pointed out there is I'd encourage some of your listeners maybe after this chat is just to go Google. How much do publishers and authors actually make, right? Unless you perhaps are, you know, the Tim Ferriss of the world and Malcolm Gladwell's, you know, they get these big advances. You know, a lot of a lot of publishers have gone the self publishing route. So I mean, the advantage is definitely the control of control, right control over the content. And it's just simply a way to make more money. You know, like, oftentimes people like I myself have created content under pen names. That's a very popular route to go. Most of my members in my program also do pen names, because it gives you more flexibility, right? You can go into different niches or different pen names. And it's just it's just once I always tell people this, like, so my wife's a baker. Actually, she's a she's got a little, little cookie business. But I was compared to like baking a cake, right? You know, like you need to put the right ingredients in at the right time to come up with this delicious cake. So the idea behind publishing is very similar. You're just doing certain things at certain times, there are rinse and repeat, they're going to result in a book that's going to make you royalties month after month. Now, I can just tell you right now, I have never lost money on a book in terms of creating the book, in part because if you follow a plan, follow process, sometimes the ROI is not as fast as you would like. But in the day, if you follow a plan for a process, yeah, you're going to make these royalties from these books. Okay, very good. I just realized my mic wasn't on. So now hopefully now you guys can hear me. I Mac has pretty good mic in itself, but it's not as good as my sure mic. So glad to get that on. So one of the big reasons that I wanted to talk, wanted to bring you on, talk about Kindle Direct Publishing was because a lot of my audience is looking for, they don't have capital upfront to invest. So they're looking for side hustles or just ways to make some extra capital to hopefully get into investing. So who is this best suited for? And also who is it not really suited for? What are kind of some of the qualities that you see for people who are successful and also people who are not? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I actually often go in this with my members as well is if you have, I would say four to six hours a week is the sweet spot to work on. That's important, right? Especially if you don't have the capital or funds. So the way this business works, and this is why I love this publishing business is because if you want, you can outsource it all. You can have it all done, cover creation, book content, marketing, everything, or you can DIY it. And when I first started, it was all about DIY. Almost all of it, I'd say probably a good 90% of it. So people that have three to five hours, four, six hours a week, whether that's an hour a day, whether that's a Saturday morning, whatever it might be, that's important. Someone also who has some ability to kind of follow, I'll give you a story. I had someone join the program who wanted to write golf joke books, golf joke books. And I was like, that's probably not going to be quite in demand enough for us, right? So you have to have sort of some ability to find a niche, find a topic that's got that sweet spot of demand plus interest. And there are probably going to be dozens, if not even hundreds of those niches out there. And if you have the ability to kind of follow that, apply yourself and launch, that's really one of the keys here. So if you don't have any money, this is how I would approach this publishing business. I call them quick win books, quick win books. What are those, right? Quick win books are books that are on the lower content side and they have the interior files. So the inside of the book repeats quite a bit. So think to yourself, you know, Yahtzee scoresheets or some sort of lower content journal type book, you know, like, I don't know. It could be a number of different things, but the idea behind it is you have a great cover, this interior file that repeats. And then what you're doing is, how I like to do it, is I like to add bonuses to these books, right? And the bonuses could be, you know, I use ChatGPT for this, but the bonuses could be very simple. The bar is low, right? Maybe it could be additional pages, maybe it could be sometimes sort of a PDF checklist related to that book. So you can kind of play around with that. But the idea is you're using these quick win books, getting that template down for book one and then rinsing and repeating, right? Rinsing and repeating. And that, and you can just continue doing that. You can just continue doing that until, you know, you scale past four figures a month. Or what some people do is they start there, they start there and then they go, let me now create a higher content book, right? A higher content book, higher price points, more profits per book. You can now explore doing things like translations, which is a huge opportunity. Amazon, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, those are just really excellent markets to go into with not much competition. And you can really just start to play around with it a little bit. You know, like everyone starts from somewhere. I certainly started on the lower end and then eventually gone to a position where most things are just outsourced. They're just delegated. Okay. And I think we probably have a similar philosophy. What I usually do with businesses, and this would be no different, is you start with doing it all yourself and you start with the easiest stuff. And then you kind of use the funds that you start making from that to make your process easier. You can start outsourcing stuff, maybe get some better software. And so you're kind of bootstrapping your own business. So you're starting... This is the way I do with almost all businesses so that you don't need the capital up front, is you start, do it yourself. Then over time, you can scale. And then I'm sure now, like you said, you don't probably do your own cover art and things like that. You pay somebody who's better at that to do that. Is that kind of the same philosophy you have? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's funny now too, with sort of AI and this ChatGPT revolution, it's really allowed... When I first started, you kind of had to... Unless you wrote it yourself, which took a little bit of a long time, the focus on quality was a little tricky. But now with AI options, the incredible coverage you can create with prompts, the incredible content you can produce, it's impressive. So it really kind of cuts down that ability and that cost while still producing a high-quality book. Because for me, especially in the nonfiction space, especially in that space, you want to go, okay, how can I publish a book that readers are going to love? Because if you can do that, that really sets the foundation for, as I say, those monthly ongoing recurrent royalties. Because if you kind of publish a not-so-good book and you do this launch plan, yeah, it'll sell. It'll get some visibility for sure. But then what's the point if the book dies out after a month or two? You want to put yourself in a position to get that recurrent royalties, which is really the power of publishing. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, Subash, I was going to ask the same question. So sometimes when I talk to Kindle Direct Publishing people, sometimes they present it as it's as easy as you go to ChatGPT and say, write chapter one of a book about this. Write chapter two. How do you integrate ChatGPT? And obviously, ChatGPT can't just write the whole book. So how does that look for you and what you've seen successful and not successful? Yeah. So from my experience so far with that space is, I mean, I personally use ChatGPT in the following ways. I use it for niche research. I use it for title creation, especially subtitle creation. I believe there's a certain format you need to follow for title and subtitle. A little SEO based, also benefit driven. And then for the book outline piece, wonderful tool for book outline piece, wonderful tool for book description. Now, when it comes to actually creating the book's content, you can use ChatGPT. But as Subash is saying here, how do you get rid of the AI generated copyright issue? So as I say, hey, listen, the best thing to do is check with Amazon before you publish. But my general rule of thumb is I typically use different proofreaders, editors to humanize the writing and just make it a little bit more, just make sure it flows nicely. And I always make sure that at the end of the day, the book is read like a real book that's got a lot of value, a lot of quality to it. And if you can do that, that is a really excellent way to use AI. Okay. Love it. Can you tell us a little bit about how much money can you make and maybe incorporate that a little bit with your story? So like when you first got started, like you said, your first few books, you're not making a million dollars probably. But can you kind of tell us just a little bit about your journey and then how should people who are just getting started think about, you know, how long is it going to take me to where I can make a good amount of income from something like this? Yeah. I mean, I always tell people, you know, give yourself, give yourself this 12 month mindset and you're going to see results well before that. And I'm very, I'm very much a big believer in getting quick wins right away. But the reason why I say that is because what you want to do is you want to have this 12 month mindset from day one, because that will allow you to kind of have patience as things grow. The way the publishing business works the most part is it's kind of like this. It's like this hockey stick curve, right? And, you know, in terms of like what you can do royalty wise, heck, you can have one book, your first book, make you four or five grand plus a month. It totally is possible. I've seen it happen multiple times. I always try to tell people to manage expectations. So I say, let's go for some quick wins first, right? Go through the process, make your first dollar, make your first hundred bucks, make your first thousand bucks, and then build, build from there. So in terms of timelines, we can get to that too, a little bit. It depends how motivated or it depends how fast you go. But for me, general timelines are this two to six weeks from zero to published, right? I want you to have that book up and running, right? Then from there, I could follow a 30 day launch plan. To me, the launch plan is critical. A lot of people do not know how to get these books visible on Amazon, which is a real big piece for your book to do well. And then from there, it's a match rinsing and repeating, right? So if you give yourself a good three months, giving yourself time, maybe there's some questions you have, maybe there's some bumps in the road, but then you've done it once. And now you can start to go faster and really kind of rinse and repeat the process. That's kind of how I did it. I think, like I said, that first year, as I said, was a challenge. For me, I think it was about someone that three to six month range. And I believe one month, I was able to make almost $3,000, almost $3,000, which was at the time what I was making with my job. And I was like, oh, wow, that's insane. That's crazy. And so that was like... But having said that, the big one for me, I'll never forget this day, making that first dollar. I'll never forget that. I took my dashboard, my Kale Direct Publishing dashboard, and I made a dollar. And I was like, that's amazing. I was like, I didn't even have to work for this. I was probably working my 6 a.m. to 6 a.m. job. And I was just like, there's something here. There's something here. So that's kind of where things took off from. Yeah, absolutely. And let me know in the comments, because there's something just so strange about even if you're making, let's say you're making $100,000 in your nine to five job. There's something about when you get that, even if it's $20 or something from this side thing that you're doing, there's just something about that first money that you actually make. And then there's another kind of transition point when you make a significant amount of money, when you're like, wow. And then there's a third one where you're making more than you make in your nine to five. And for me, that's been kind of three different experiences. But yeah, seeing that first money come in is super motivating, because I think a lot of people think I can't do this. Yeah, Nick's doing it. I've heard of other people doing it. I can't do it. I can't make a dollar doing this. So yeah, that first feeling, that sense, yeah, Sebastian says that sense of accomplishment. Totally, totally agree with you there. Let me ask you this too. So part of me, I'm doing this partly for my audience, partly for myself, because I have 30 some income streams. I'm constantly going left and right. I have irons in the fire all over. Anybody who tries to talk with me knows my brain is scattered. How much focus do you need? Can this just be a side hustle for somebody where my goal is to make $500 a month and I'm just going to stop there? And how much focus is needed for that compared to, I want this to be my full-time thing. I want to make 10K a month. What's the difference in work there and focus? And what's been your experience with that? Yeah. I mean, time after time, I've seen this. And actually, a little bit of a backstory for you, kind of related to this, is my wife went through a period of time too, before we got married, where she was frustrated with her job. She's like, okay, I'm going to get into publishing like you have. I think she got up to over two grand a month at one point, and then she kind of completely dropped it. She didn't touch it at all. And like seven years later, I think she makes about a hundred bucks a month still with it. So hey, we always laugh. It's like, hey, that pays for the gas or whatever it might be. I think the way to approach this is, my recommendation is, for a short period of time, even a period of a week or two, to be honest, like somewhere in your position, is make it your main focus. Make it your main focus where maybe you block off three or five hour chunks over the course of a week or whatever it might be. And just the idea here is, you want to get to milestones, right? So the way I see it, it's three phases, right? Book creation, book launch, and next level publishing. So the book creation piece, when you're going through it the first time, you kind of have the most questions. You won't be quite sure. It's one thing for me to tell someone how to do it. It's another for them to experience themselves. So the idea is, you want to get through that milestone, kind of plow to that. Once you launch the book, once you're ready to launch the book, there's really not that much to do. Once the book is live, published, up there on Amazon, making your royalties, there's really not much ongoing things to do, unless you want to go back and do that rinse and repeat process where you now publish more. And I always tell people, third option is what I call next level publishing. You don't have to do it. By all means, you don't have to do it, but it's a real cool way to take your existing content, existing work, and now maybe you do translations. Maybe you publish on a couple of wholesaling websites. What I mean by that is that, for instance, let's say I've got a book on, I don't know, a log exam or test prep type book. Well, if I'm a wholesaler, if I'm an independent bookstore, I'm not going to go to Amazon to buy those books. I'm going to go to the wholesaler's website. So we make our books available there as well. There's a few other things in that space as well you can do, but the idea that I always tell people is you want to stack those assets, ebook, paperback, hardcover, perhaps audio, be as wide as possible, and then take it from there. Do it once and take it from there. Hey, you know what? That was pretty easy. I'm going to do it again. Or you know what? I'm happy making a few hundred bucks a month. I'm just going to keep it at that and have it cover some expenses and not maybe focus on other things like with your 30 streams. Actually, I'm actually interested to hear more about that down the road too. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And hopefully this is one that can work for some people in my audience. Okay. You kind of talked a little bit about this before. And sorry, I have a whole bunch of questions. I've been really curious about this, so I'm glad to find kind of an expert in it. Do you need to be an expert in something or do you need to be a good writer? Can you do this with only the low content books like you mentioned, journals and mazes and things like that? What's been your experience with that? Yeah, you definitely don't need to be a writer. I would say most people in this space, in the self-publishing space that get into this are usually not writers. If you're a writer, that helps. That definitely helps. I think the one challenge with super low content, what I mean by that is maybe a log book or something like that. It's hard to differentiate yourself. It's hard to be different. And what you want to do is even if you do it on the lower content, medium content stuff, medium content could be things like a children's riddle book, a would you rather book. It could be, as I said, I think I saw someone the other day do well with a Taylor Swift coloring book or something like this. So maybe you add a little more content to the front part or the back part of it. So you definitely don't need to be a writer. You can just kind of stick to, I always kind of say have that sort of kind of that 12-month mentality in mind, but let's get it going. Let's work in these short one or two-week little sprints, get to those milestones. And I always tell people, publish just one book, just publish one book, just do it. You will gain so much knowledge, so much inherent knowledge by doing that with that process once that it would surprise you how much faster you can go if you decide to go to a different niche or if you decide to continue on in that same niche. Yeah. And I think that's another thing I really like what you said, milestones. You don't aim at 10K a month as your first goal. Okay. My goal is to get, because that can seem overwhelming for people, especially if you're just getting a few sales on your first book. So I always say, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? So my end goal is 10K a month. So let's start with getting one book out. Okay. And maybe it'll make you 50, a hundred bucks a month or something like that. But that's the first step in several steps that gets you to your 10K a month. So I think that's good advice there. And we've got Lowe's here. He says, Nick is the best person I've ever worked with, truly passionate about his work and helping others create additional income through KDP. So that's a good, that's a good testimonial. I didn't even pay Lowe's or anything. He just hopped on the channel and said that. So that's awesome. Let's see. I've got so many questions. I have like 15 questions here. We're not going to get through all of these. For your quick win books, like kind of some of the low content books, do you use Sopper? I've been, I've talked about you, Book Bolt before is one that I've used where they help you put together like mazes and things like that. Do you find that software like that's helpful or what's been your experience with that? Absolutely. Book Bolt is, is, is fantastic. Great, a great resource. I always tell people, and if you're going to go this route is, you know, try to think about how you can add, you know, add extra layer quality, add a bonus to your book. How can you be different than what's out there? Because what some people do is they'll go and they'll take one of these, these templates on a set like Book Bolt. And I'm like, okay, I'll just use that. And that's all I'll do. So from my experience, you can do that if you just want to test it out and not think about too much and nothing wrong with that, right? You can probably get something out in a weekend. But I always recommend if you can sort of add sort of that other layer, most people are not going to do that. So if you can like do that 10% extra, that can oftentimes be a big, a big, a big difference between you having success or not. Okay. And then from your experience, quantity versus quality, do you, have you found with people it's better to make a hundred bad books or one good book? Which, which would you, if somebody was going to pick between those two, which would you pick? I'm so glad you asked that question. I'm no doubt about it. One high quality book supersedes and does way better than a hundred plus low quality books. And I think that if you have that mindset of, you know, putting yourself in the reader's position and seeing what would, what they would want. I actually tell people all the time in my, in my group, I say, go buy, buy the best-selling book that you're thinking about kind of publishing in that niche. Go buy and see what does it look like? What does it feel like? Hold on your hand. Like, okay, yeah, this is a five-star book that makes X amount of money per month. Okay. This is what I'm trying to trying to shoot for. So I always, I always suggest that that focus on quality for me is really number one, whether it's low content, medium content or high content. Okay. Nope. Super helpful. I agree with that. I think that's what I've found too. I've actually put out a few books, but they were what you just said. In fact, I cringed a little bit, but I just took a book bowl template and then I just threw it out there and I'm like, why is nobody buying my identical journal to like 50 other journals? That's actually more expensive. So I think you're right. I think putting a little bit more effort in making it stand out a little bit for me has been, I've had more success with that. Let's talk a little bit about your process. I don't want you to give all your, your secret sauce because you do have a program, right? So I do want to talk about that a little bit too. But maybe just so people can get kind of a general idea. Subash here asks, according to your expertise, what are the kind of books that would sell good? Where do you find those metrics? So how do you start the process of trying to find, do you think about what am I interested in or what's the process of even starting? How do I find a book to write? Yeah. And I just want to go back to your other comment about the book bowl thing. Don't worry. I've done all those same mistakes as well. So don't, don't feel bad. I mean, that's, that's common. The way I look at finding those niches is kind of like a red light, green light approach. What I mean by that is that I've got a set of criteria that I look at, right? Is there demand for that topic? Can I compete with other books in that space? Are there other similar books selling with certain ranks or certain things? Like for instance, the nonfiction, your biggest moneymaker and most niches is going to be the paperback version of the book. So I try to go, okay, how's that book ranking? How much money is, are books in that space making? So what I do is, is if it doesn't pass a certain criteria, okay, red light, forget about that niche. If it does pass, okay, green light, let's go for it. And then there's some that are amber as well too. There's some niches where I'm like, okay, well there's some promise in here, but it's going to be hard to compete. So I better think about that. What kind of nuance can I add to it? But there are just, you know, there's, it's, it's rare. Like, let's put it this way. As soon as I show people how you do this niche research, like they have a problem of finding too many niches. They don't know where to start because once you kind of see it, you can't unsee it. It's like, oh, okay. So there's, you know, like if you go to amazon.com, you know, and just right now, if you want to go amazon.com, you can go to books, all those categories there, like 80% plus are going to be nonfiction. And within each category, there's going to be subcategories and subcategories, and there's going to be money-making niches within each of those. You know, you can really drill down quite a bit too. Like I've had some books do quite well in some fairly obscure niches just because I took the time to just go, okay, let's, let's just go through the process. Is it green light, red light? Okay. Let's, let's give it a go. Okay. And do you use software to do that? I, cause I, you know, I always go back and forth. Like, is it better to, if you do something too broad, you know, then nobody's going to find it because there's a million books, but if you do something too focused, then, oh, there's only five searches for redheaded blue shirt. I don't know something, something super niche like that. So do you use software to find that or how do you know how broad or how narrow to go? Yeah, that's a great question. So I kind of do it, I do it two different ways, old school manual way, where I just kind of go to amazon.com and look and look under the sort of the books category. And I hone in on those paperbacks and kind of just dig around a little bit. I kind of pretend like I have my little research hat on. I'm just researching right now. No judgment. I'm just kind of just trying to poke around a little bit. Maybe I've got coffee in my hand and just kind of seeing, seeing what's there. And then there's definitely software options too. One of my favorite softwares out there is, is bookbeam, bookbeam.io, fantastic resource. They essentially have a niche research finder tool where you kind of basically set the of what you're looking for. How many reviews does the book have? What's the rank? What's the category? What's the keyword? And yeah, you can, you know, I, the way I kind of tell people is it's good to know the old school way because I feel like that's, that's a skill to have that niche research skill. And then a bookbeam just really just enhances that. It's like, okay, yeah, this is, this is a good niche for me to go into. It's almost like a verification tool that I use at this point. But yeah, bookbeam is, bookbeam is one of the few, one of the few software tools that I really recommend in this space. Not much is needed, but that's definitely one that can be a huge help to self-publishers. Okay. Very good. And I think sometimes too people, when they think of books and you've already talked a little bit about this, but when people think of books, they only think of like books. But other people I've talked to with KDP, they've had their best success with like work. They take a popular book and then make a workbook with questions about it and things like that. Do you have kind of just, just to get people's brain going, do you have kind of maybe a little list of just some things to get people thinking about? Oh, that's something I could actually do. Yeah. I mean, workbooks, great tool. My suggestion is if you go into workbooks there, I think one of the top workbooks in early January was related to James Clear's Atomic Habits. So if you can kind of, and once again, this is why I always say have that 12 month mindset. If you can kind of have, okay, what's going to sell around perhaps mother's day or father's day, that sort of thing. So what I would say is focus on that a little bit. Speaking of which seasonal books, those can be like game changers. I know some people that do so well between sort of Black Friday and January 1st on certain books that the rest of the year, the book doesn't sell, but they don't care. It doesn't matter because their book has done so well. Same thing with Valentine's day. If you go to amazon.com, you'll see some Valentine's day book, just really crushing it. Basically, the idea behind that is if you can have every season covered, you are in a really, really good spot. For me, I think the way I approach books is I categorize them, right? Lower content, medium content, and then home run style books, right? Sometimes I'll go for a home run style book too, where I'm like, you know what? I'm going to make an authority book on this topic. Maybe it's an exam prep book. Maybe it's a gardening type book. I'm not sure, but I just would go all out for it, go all into it. And that's another option as well for people. Okay. I love that. Yeah. It's like a Christmas tree farm. I have a Christmas tree farm near my house. They make 600K during the Christmas season, nothing the rest of the year, but they don't care. That's like their business is their 600K. Um, so Valentine's day, probably too late for this year, but St. Patrick's day coming up or Valentine's day next year. So definitely, uh, definitely have seen that. Um, let's see. Uh, what was I going to ask? Oh yes. How do you, um, balance, have you found it's better to find something you're passionate about and go that direction? Or is it better to go niche, find a profitable niche and then just try to get excited about it and research it? Or, uh, or do you have a take on that or is it just kind of user preference? You know what it ideally is? There's that sort of Venn diagram when you have the passion interest and demand that's that's ideal. Um, typically for me, I go to what's in demand and what's the most profitable. Usually that's the first criteria. If there's an interest in it, I will explore it even further. Um, I do find a funny coincidence. As soon as you start making money off of a book that all of a sudden now you're interested in that topic. So, so that's something to keep in mind, mind as well. That's a good, and honestly, that's actually really good advice. If there's something you want to learn about, then this could be a great research tool for, you know, compiling it and organizing that. Um, I hadn't really thought about that, but this could be a great learning technique. You know, you want to learn about the civil war or something like that, you know, the certain general or something, you know, you can focus on that and you'll learn quite a bit. That's amazing. I also want to throw out there to my audience. If you KDP, if you publish a book and it's on Amazon and you email me, I will buy every, I will buy at least one of every book that my audience publishes. So you will get at least one sale. So let me know. I've actually already had a few members of my audience take advantage of that. Um, so let me know, shoot me an email. I will buy your book and I'll leave a review if I like it. I maybe won't leave a negative review if it's a bad book, but, um, let me know. That'd be awesome. Um, all right. And then also, again, not giving all your secret sauce. And I do want to get to your program here in a minute. Um, marketing I think is, that's kind of an unknown. So I think getting a book published, somebody can just go do that and they can get something out there published. It's pretty self-explanatory. Um, you can do that. But then the marketing I think is something where people have no idea. I mean, do you do ads or what kind of marketing do you do to kind of get, make that book successful? Yeah, this was one that I struggled with for a long time. I would, I would publish some books and some books would do well and some books wouldn't, and I'd have the same focus on quality. Right. So kind of getting back to that persistence mindset is I eventually start just to create a checklist, like what needs to happen from my books to do well. So you start to notice certain patterns. And so what I have now essentially is a 30 day checklist and 30 days. It's not just randomly picked. Now I don't work for Amazon. Um, but from what we understand that there's a third, there's a kind of 30 day new release boost, right? So what you're trying to do is there are so many books being published every day on Amazon. You're trying to show Amazon, Hey, my book is high quality. People are reading it. They're reviewing it. They like it. So the idea is you're kind of trying to show them that you have this sort of ability to go up, up the hill here. So the idea is those first 30 days, I basically do something where I'm heavily promoting my ebook promotion, sorry, my ebook. How am I doing that? I'm using paid promotion sites. I'm using the five day Kindle unlimited free promotion opportunity. So that's kind of the one aspect of it. And then on the paperback side of it, I'm driving reviews to the paperback version of the book, which shows up on both ebook and paperback. I also leverage Amazon ads as well. Now, most niches require some sort of, of, um, focus on ads. Some niches, you don't have to, some niches you don't have, you can go in there and do more organic marketing. But oftentimes for me, five or 10 bucks a day can go, can go a long way. And the idea behind, behind ads is you're just trying to sort of feed Amazon's algorithm, tell them where to show your book. And if you can nail those, those pieces of the marketing puzzle, the idea is you get to day 31, you've got a book that's been launched properly, and then you set the stage for those month after month of royalties. Okay. Very good. Um, and then do you see this getting saturated? I think anytime people start seeing, Oh, there's all these KDP millionaires that are popping up. And I think people start to get worried. Oh, I missed this craze. I'm too late. Um, do you see this getting saturated and have you seen it get more difficult as more people are getting into this? Yeah. I mean, I used to hear that. I mean, I've been publishing for 10 years. I heard about saturation. When I first started, people were like, Oh, it's saturated back then. So my, my belief is that readers have become more savvy. Um, and which is a good thing, which, which really weeds out a lot of the low quality publishers. Um, so what I've noticed is sort of, this is kind of like this kind of phase I call it like book creation, but creation 1.0 was basically throw up anything on Amazon and it would probably sell as long as it wasn't terrible. It would sell. And then the 2.0 phase was okay. The readers are a little bit more aware now of things you want to focus on quality, quality covers, quality content, look at some reviews, whether review saying about these books, incorporate that into your own book. And now we're in this kind of 3.0 phase where it's like, okay, we can now publish these high quality books. We can partially leverage AI as well. And at the end of the day, in my opinion, very few people that, um, how should I put this? It's, it's very easy to, to miss things, right? Going back to that baking analogy. Um, when you're baking that cake, a lot of people, okay, maybe they have the, the niche pick and the content good, but don't know how to launch, or maybe they have, you know, a pretty good niche, poor content, and they can really launch well, well, then eventually the book dies out. So it's, it's, to me, it's kind of a rare combination to have all of those pieces in place. If you have all those pieces in place, you can do quite well. I mean, I've had people on my program go into pretty competitive niches. Um, you know, I'll give you one now. It was like this sort of, I think it was Mediterranean diet or keto diet, which if you go on Amazon, it's got like tens and thousands of results. Um, and he was able to do very well with it just because he had the sort of nuanced approach to it. That was a little bit different than whatever else was doing. And, and that's sometimes all it takes. Okay. Very good. Um, let's move over to talk a little bit about your program and what you do to help people. Um, because I know it's possible to be successful without using Nick's program, but when I find experts like this, it's just, it's super charges. It speeds everything up again, rather than you having to go learn all the lessons, um, Nick can learn the lessons for you and just teach you. So, um, what would you say? You can be a little self boasting here if you want to. Um, but what do you kind of see for the success rate and the learning curve for people who just go at their own and learn all the lessons and maybe yourself, you know, how many, how long did it take you to really start to figure stuff out versus someone who just jumps into your program? How much does that speed people up? Yeah, it definitely is, is, is the speed track. Like I've, like, I think the thing that's kind of different about me is that I'm a publisher first and definitely not someone who's like had a good month or six month. And now it's okay. Now let's go do this publishing profits Academy thing. So for me, the program itself is very 80, 20, and I'm hearing this constantly from people join the program. I'm a big believer in going from A to B as quickly as possible. Um, I feel like, especially when you start something like this, if it takes you a long time to see results, you will quit. You will, you will not, you will not do it. So, um, the program is just basically structured as I mentioned before, but sort of the book creation, book launch, and next level publishing. And that's, that's the core of it. Um, I can actually send you my Smith school and perhaps, um, here, but it's on, yeah, it's on school is where my, where my stuff is housed. But, um, what we try to do is, and I've noticed these patterns now because we have over 90 members is that book creation phase is where people going from zero to one have the most questions, right? What niche do I pick? How do I, how do I set up my title? Um, how should I get this book created? Should I, should I get a ghost written? Should I use a ghost writing service? Should I use AI? Um, that sort of thing. So, you know, I would tell people it's not a course, you know, of course, if you want a course, there's lots of options out there for courses. It's the way I structure right now is basically set of dynamic lessons plus one-on-one access to me. So I like giving people feedback, you know, like I kind of geek out on this stuff. Like, um, you know, for instance, covers, like my cover designers hate working with me. They hate it because I'm always like, you know, we got like the font size has got to be a little different or we have to change this or whatever it might be. So the idea, the idea is that we're just really doing things in a sequential manner, going as quickly as possible with a focus on quality to milestone one, right? Get that book piece done. Okay. Now let's, let's go into that book launch. Okay. Once it's launched, now let's explore taking that work you've already done and perhaps getting it translated, perhaps getting into, you know, outside of Amazon and do wide distribution, perhaps even do a Shopify site, have a direct Excel. So that's, that's how it's structured. It's just very sequential. And I've noticed this a few times now is that people, you know, especially from the zero to run crowd, they do it once and it just clicks. It clicks. It's very beginner friendly. Like for me personally, I have failed at things like, I think I tried FBA for a little bit. I tried cold email for a little bit. Like I have, I have failed with those things. This thing always just clicked. It's just like, okay, like it just kind of makes sense. So I took all that sort of knowledge I've had put it into the program and yeah, people that are following it are getting results. Probably my favorite one so far is someone who came to me who English wasn't even his first language and I give him all the credit. He executed on everything, but he just followed what I said the whole, the whole way along. And I think in his first full month of publishing, it was over 2,500 USD or something like that. And the cool part about that is that the groundwork is laid for him to now just continue to rinse and repeat and scale that as high as he wants. Okay. Love that. Yeah. That was going to ask that next because sometimes I think people are afraid to get into programs because they think, okay, yeah, they'll give me some, some ideas, but then I'll get stuck at this point and it's not going to end up working. How step-by-step do you kind of help people through it? And then along with that, do you find that pretty much anyone can be successful going through this? Or have you had failures of people that have gone through and just I can't do this. They throw up their hands and leave. I always say, I'll tell people, you know, failure is impossible. Failure, only way failure is going to happen is if you quit, if you quit, then you're guaranteed to fail. I've got people in my program. I've got someone who's 80 years old in the program all the way to like 20 that they're, they're in college and they're doing this as opposed to a, as opposed to a part-time job. So I always tell people it's, it's, it's very sequential, very step-by-step on purpose because I've taken some, some programs in the space as well. And I was confused because I'm always trying to learn myself as well. And I was like, there's either too much information or it's not structured properly. So, you know, the, the, the details might change, you know, new softwares might come out. You know, new things might, might be occurring, but you know, what I've noticed is if you can nail the foundational pieces of the book creation, book launch, that is, is really all you need to be successful in this space. Okay. And yeah, I tell people too, the advantage, another advantage of a program like this is a lot of times people hear about this and they get all excited about it. Like right now, some people are probably going to watch this and they're going to say, I'm going to do this. I'm going to write a best-selling book. And then they start. And then you get to the point where the excite, there's kind of this graph of excitement goes down and amount of work is kind of starting to go up. And then there's a number of these types of things where people stop about halfway through. And when you're in a program like this, especially a program that you pay for sometimes, Oh, I paid for that. I better at least, you know, see that through the end. And I find the advantage of these programs is just somebody to keep you going and keep reminding you, Hey, don't stop. You're, you're halfway through put in just this little bit more work and you'll start to see some results. So that's something I'd recommend for people to tell us a little bit about the cost then. And then you have a guarantee here as well. Can you just tell us a little bit about how much does this cost? You talked a little bit about timeframe of how long and until people start to see results, but then tell us about the guarantee to how that works. Yeah. So timelines that I like to focus on for people and I'll tell the cost in a second is, you know, fall in the program zero, three months. I want you to add about two, 2k, 2000 in royalties, three to six months. I want you to scale into from two to five and then six months and beyond the sprint is on to 10k. That's, that's kind of how I like to sort of follow it. The investment right now is currently $3,000. And so with that, you know, you get a lot of support one-on-one DM access, weekly calls, onboarding calls. In fact, what I do for a lot of people is if they have any issues, any challenges finding their niches, I go in and give them niches. I say, okay, you know, just take this niche and go with it. And usually it's based upon their goals too, right? Based upon their goals, based upon their time. Some people say, I want to do a home run book. Let's go that route. Okay. No problem. Some people say, you know what, I'll kind of get my feet wet, do a lower content book. Let's see how that one works out. Okay. Yes. Awesome. And then let's see, can you talk about the guarantee too? I think that's important for people. Yeah, I think it's important for people to know that, you know, like this is the internet, people say a lot of crazy things on the internet. I certainly have seen a lot of interesting things here. I think it's just important to just have someone that's going to be with you and work with you for free, as I say here, until you're making at least $2,000 a month in royalties. I think it's important to have that in place because I believe that if you don't quit, you follow the process, you take action. It's impossible for you to not be making this much money after a certain period of time. Like you will get there. It's just a matter of time. And yeah, I think that this is the piece that I think some people, you know, it's good to hear. And I also want to emphasize to you that once again, you know, like I've been fortunate enough to do well with publishing. I've been doing it for 10 years. I'm hoping to do for another 10 years plus, and I'm really enjoying this education space. I'm really enjoying helping people build publishing businesses. So hopefully I'll be doing this for a long time as well. Yeah. You know, that's a question I get all the time. And I think you understand this, entrepreneurs understand this, but I get asked all the time, well, if it's so profitable, why are you having other people do it? Why don't you just go publish all the books? But there's something, it's very rewarding. I think it's like the next step in entrepreneurism is when you kind of have hit success yourself, that's usually people's first goal is I want to be successful first and I want financial freedom and time freedom. But then what I see the progression in almost every single person is the next thing is I want to help other people get what I've experienced. And so because someone's selling something on the internet does not mean that they're a scammer. It means, Hey, I've been successful with this. I want to share my success with other people. And I mean, I do want to be compensated too, for what I'm doing. Like I'm not, it's not a charity it's to help people. And also to putting some money invested does keep, keep people focused. And Hey, I put in 3000 bucks into this. I'm going to make sure I see it to the end. Cause I like what you said. The only way to fail is if you just stop. I mean, that's really the only way that you can say I failed. A hundred percent. And, and, you know, my, my vision with, with even the price points give people an insane ROI. So one of the pieces that we didn't touch on yet is, is, is that a lot of people are looking to buy these publishing businesses. You know, there's sites you can go on like empireflippers.com, Flippa and some others where there are people looking to buy these businesses. Because the margins are good. Time commitment is low. So, you know, there's no, I say that, that, that true grant is even a true grant. You could be looking at an exit around 50k type of thing, right? So that opportunity is really exciting and fairly new as well. So keep that in mind. You're also building a sellable asset. Should you choose? Awesome. Love that. Yeah. And again, there's, there's a lot of KDP experts out there. So just so my audience knows the reason I chose Nick partly because of a guarantee like this, because I can tell just from looking at Nick's content and what he puts out on Twitter, which by the way, go follow Nick on Twitter. If you don't already, he's got a lot of good stuff on there. But I know that you are not just trying to sell something, but you are trying to actually help people be successful. If you were just trying to sell something, I've seen it a million times. It's going to be just a 497 training course with no interaction with you at all. It's a 497 blueprint to success with KDP. That's not how things like this work. So having that access to Nick where he, he wants you to be successful. And I'm so glad, glad Lowe's popped on here again. I didn't, I don't know who Lowe's is. It looks like a cool guy. Lowe's, maybe we should connect sometime. But you can hear from someone who's worked with Nick that Nick is truly passionate about helping others with what he's found success in himself. So love that. Awesome. Well, I think we will go ahead and close there. If anyone has any other questions, what's the best way for people to get questions answered is, is book a call. How serious do people need to be before they book a call with you? Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a really good route right now. I mean, speaking of 8020, I haven't even created my own site yet. I've just been so focused on creating the membership and focus on members. So I should get on that, I guess. But yeah, that's, that's one of the best ways to do it. There's a bit of a form that's filled out there. Once you decide to book a call, the purpose behind that is we just want to make sure that A, we can help you and B, you have the potential to be highly successful with publishing. So that's how that form is set up. Feel free as well to DM me on Twitter. I'm very active on Twitter as James knows. So that's a really good way to DM me something like KDP or something and we can start the conversation from there. But yeah, I love this stuff. And this has been just a fantastic opportunity. So I can talk about this for hours, to be honest. Yeah. No, I, well, I love it. Honestly, the fact that you didn't have a website and I asked Nick, I was like, Hey, do you have an affiliate program? Cause that's how I get paid. Like I'm not, Nick's not paying me to be on here or anything. And he was like, not really. What would you recommend for getting one set up? But the fact that he's not, that this is not just a marketing thing where he's just, I'm going to try to sell this to as many people as I can. I'm going to make, you know, $20 million selling my Kindle direct publishing course to people. That was the reason I had Nick on. So I liked the fact that you didn't have a website and that it's not super polished and all this. I think that's, it's a sign that you're going to actually help people be successful and not just push them through some system that you have that they may or may not succeed. And then what always happens too, is then they blame the person. Well, you, the reason you failed is cause you didn't do this, this and this. So I love the guarantee and I just really appreciate you and the, the knowledge that you're bringing. And I, I think we'll, I think we'll see more of you on the channel. Hopefully. Yeah, that would be great. I'm still trying to decide if this is something I should do. Let me just ask you, we'll close with this question. Sure. I'm a very busy guy. Okay. I don't have a ton of extra time. I'm doing a lot of different stuff. Yes. I love the idea behind this. I love the idea of being an author too. I have a lot of things that I am passionate about and want to get out there. Do you think this would be a good thing for me to join your program? You know what? It totally would be. It totally is up your alley. I think for you, I think the tricky thing will be the time and things. So I think for you that, you know what I would suggest is having like a real good plan to get to that book creation phase as quickly as possible. Right? So niche selection, tail creation, book creation plan, focus on that. And that's more than half the work. And I always tell people, you know, five to 10 hours, you know, overall gets you a long way, gets you a long way. So I would say if you have a little bit of a lull, maybe in your time, if you can block off you know, a Saturday morning type of thing, four or five hours, that can go a long way towards getting your first book properly published. I call it the PPA way, Puppets Academy way. And I think once you do it once, you'll be hooked. Okay. Awesome. Well, we'll talk more and my audience, I'll keep you up to date if I decide to go forward with it. And I'll let you know the process as I, if I go through the program, I won't share all your secret sauce and stuff, but I'll let you guys know, hey, yeah, we just went through this and I got a title picked out and all this. So I'll keep you guys up to date. So we will go ahead and wrap up their audience. Appreciate you guys so much. You guys are amazing. Thank you for showing up and going with me on all these crazy journeys. We've looked at so many crazy different ways to make money. This is one I'm particularly excited about. I think is a good fit for a lot of people, especially people, you know, we just yesterday had an Amazon store guy on where you needed 40 K in capital to get started. Okay. And so I understand my guy yesterday, that's not going to work for a lot of you. A lot of people don't have 40 K sitting around. Um, this is a lot more doable for people. So love you guys and appreciate you watching. And then Nick, thank you for hopping on. And, uh, I don't think you knew this was going to be live either. I kind of sprung that on you today. I was like, Oh, by the way, it's live. Um, but thank you for hopping on, sharing your expertise and look forward to working with you. My absolute pleasure and my vision for everyone that's listening is just pick something, pick one thing, go with it and give it a good run. Um, and if it's published or something else, just, just go for it. Just, you know, it's worth, it's worth it. It's worth it. Awesome. Thank you everybody. And hope you all have a great rest of your