Can You Make $100/Day Writing A Children’s Book And Self-Publishing On Amazon?
I find out…
I set myself the challenge to write and launch a best selling children’s book in one week. I filmed every step I took to share with you exactly how I did it. And in the end, I’ll share how much money I actually make from it.
You can watch the video here, or read the full story below.
Side note: if you’re thinking of trying this yourself — use my link and get up to $100 FREE to spend on Fiverr gigs:
Here’s the story:
A couple of weeks ago, I was scrolling through TikTok looking for all the personal finance toks and I came across this guy saying you could make $100 per day writing a 100-word children’s book and self-publishing on Amazon.
Rule of thumb, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. But let’s give this guy a chance. Can we really make $100 per day this easily?
I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing this time, so I need a friend that does. And luckily, I have just the person in mind.
I dropped my friend Steve a message. He and I went to uni together. Now, not many people know this.
In fact, it’s a pretty well-kept secret that I’m about to blow up, but after a brief stint in the world of finance, Steve decided to quit his job and pursue his passion for sci-fi writing.
That’s right! Steve is a writer! He’s self-published and marketed six books on Amazon.
I’m not cheating, I swear. Writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint. But we’re gonna push to do this in a week. So the clock’s against us!
If I’m gonna stand the chance of making this work in such a short space of time, I’m going to need some help. So I head over to Steve’s place to rope him into this challenge.
With Steve successfully recruited we agree to meet up on Sunday and put this to the test.
My next step is to come up with a plan. We need to know exactly what we’re doing on the day, so we can crack on without hesitation.
This is nothing complex. I’m downloading my thoughts of what needs to be done on the back of an envelope.
That includes market research, writing the outline, writing the story, getting illustrations done, etc.
Step #1 Market Research
I set some ground rules up front. Me being a Fintech guy, I’d like us to stay on trend, so:
Rule #1: The story has to have some metaphor relating to money or personal finance; and
Rule #2: It has to be on brand! That means fantasy and magic.
Yes, we want a best seller. So we have to research which topics and themes sell best. But this isn’t just about the book. It has to be about the channel too. So whatever we write has to embody the brand and relate to Azoras.
We know right away that we’re focusing on Amazon US and not UK. The US market dwarfs the UK market.
We start by looking at the top twenty children’s books on Amazon. What do they have in common? How illustrative are they? What kind of language do they use? Which topics work best?
With a rough idea of how our book should look and feel, we move on to category research, looking at estimated sales volumes for similar children’s books on this topic. We’re looking for niche categories and the estimated sales volume we’d need to achieve in order to be a best seller in those categories.
Publisher Rocket tells us all of this and I’m using Steve’s licence so don’t pay a penny. But if you wanted to do the same a lifetime licence costs just $100.
We go category by category to find what’ll work for us, starting with the lowest level categories and ordering them by lowest sales volume required to break into the top ten for that category.
Now, there’re a lot of categories, and we need to work out which ones will work for us. It helps that we set those ground rules earlier, because it forces us to write about money with a fantasy theme. This way, we can disregard those categories that won’t fit.
According to Publisher Rocket, we only need one sale a day to hit the top ten in the Money category. This is perfect. Obviously, I want more than one sale a day. But we’re going to be smart about our category selection!
To explain what that means, here’s Steve:
“We need to identify a range of categories to appear in, from high to low sales volumes. In the lower volume ones, we’ll need less sales per day to reach the top. This means that we’ll be more visible on Amazon’s website, and our book is more likely to get a bestsellers tag. This should hopefully give us some lift in the higher categories.”
So we’ve identified our categories, and we’re ready to move on.
Step #2 Outlining Our Story
Now that we have our topic we’ve got to start with the outline…
Most stories follow the same arc:
- Inciting incident;
- Rising action;
- Climax;
- Falling action; and
- Resolution.
Together, we whiteboard the scenes for each chapter making sure they follow the arc.
In my head, I already know exactly how this story should begin as I’ve secretly been dreaming about this for a long long time 🙂
Our story begins with our male protagonist shopping for a mortgage in the goblin market.
And after a confrontation with the goblins.
Our protagonist and hero are forced to flee the city.
With no way of returning to his city, the pair set off on a journey to Azoras.
But even as they approach their destination, they didn’t count on who might have followed them.
I’m pretty happy with that, what do you guys think?
Step #3 Writing The Story
Next up it’s time to write our story. We have to put together our arc piece by piece, whilst keeping it engaging enough for children AND adults!
Not much, I can tell you about this part. We throw everything we have into a Google doc and start typing. First breaking each section of our arc into sub-elements and bulleting the important things we want to happen. Then filling it in.
Step #4 Illustrating Our Book
The final part is getting illustrations done. We can’t have a kick-arse book without kick-arse illustrations.
You can find people to do this for you on Fiverr.
Fortunately for me, my partner James, does all of the illustrations for Azoras. In general, I always favour partnering with talented people on ventures. It means giving up a piece of my pie, but I ain’t gotta pay for shiiiiit.
I set up a Google Slides and start laying out the story as I want it. Steve and I have made a list of the images we think will work well for the story so I add in placeholders where necessary.
It looks like shit but it works. Don’t over complicate things!
When I’m done I send it over. I know he’s going to think I’m insane asking for all of us, so I can’t help but laugh.
The first reply I get from James just says:
“Seen the slides…
I jump on a call with James and immediately get eaten into! James wants to kill me for asking for all of this in a week. But he knows what I’m trying to do and gets behind me.
This was probably the hardest part of all of this because I was very particular about what I wanted. We had a real rush getting this done and at one point had to scrap two days work. We tried to be too detailed with the illustrations and it just wasn’t going to happen in that short space of time.
Step #5 Putting It All Together
We’ve written the story, drawn our illustrations and designed the rough layout. Now we’ve gotta format the book for submission to Amazon’s platform. This is way mooooore complicated than I anticipated. Who knew how complex Kindle Direct Publishing could get.
I end up trawling through their website and various PDFs to see how we do this:
http://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf
When you’re publishing an illustration-heavy book, you need tight control of the layout.
In the final hour, I actual learned you could just upload a PDF to Kindle Kid’s Creator and it would convert it to a .MOBI file for upload to Kindle Direct Publishing. That simplifies everything, but if you don’t know about it, don’t expect to learn from Amazon’s help resources. My god, I need to say their UX is one of the worst I have ever experienced.
Step #6 Publishing Our Book
It’s time for us to hit publish. So, we head over to Kindle Publishing, create an account and start putting in details like the book description, the categories we found earlier and some keywords.
We’re going to use some of the categories we found earlier. Now, we found 10 categories we want, but KDP only lets us input 2. However, once you publish the book, a little trick you can do is email KDP and ask them to include your book in up to 8 more categories.
That little trick’s gonna make our book a lot more visible. Now, we have to put in some keywords. Again, we can use the Publisher Rocket software for this. It helps identify keywords with high search rates and differing levels of competition. I like the idea of our hero being female. So I give that keyword a go.
And I got blood lucky. That keyword has hardly any competition and a decent search volume. So we find some more keywords, and then upload the ebook itself. Finally, we hit submit. It takes around 3 days before the book is approved.
As that time has now passed, I’m sharing a link to the book here.
Step #7 Marketing Our Book
This has to be the most important step. And the step which our Tik Tok friend glossed over.
There’s just too much noise. You can’t expect to sell anything if you don’t market it properly.
Steve and I know this, so we don’t leave anything to chance.
We’ve put together a marketing road map for our book. And once we hit publish we crack on with the plan.
There’s a lot to cover when it comes to marketing the book. And it’ll take time to see results.
So we’ll be making a following up to this article next month to share our exact process. AND our results!
I know I’m leaving you on a cliffhanger. But I don’t want to gloss over this part.
If you’d like to watch our follow up video, check out my YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications and you’ll get an alert when we publish the marketing video for this book!
