#004 - Every Amazon KDP Mistake We Made in 2 Years (So You Don't Have To)

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In this episode we share our biggest mistakes and challenges we faced in the last 1-2 years of doing Amazon KDP. We cover multiple important self-publishing-related topics in this video and hope that with this input you can learn from our mistakes instead of making them yourself.  

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Disclaimer:
I cannot promise any specific financial outcomes as a result of applying the strategies and ideas discussed in this video. This content does not constitute financial or investment advice. It's crucial that you conduct your own research and make well-informed decisions. Your success will rely on your commitment, effort, experience, and knowledge. Although I aim to provide accurate information, I cannot ensure that all websites or resources mentioned in this video are without errors. By viewing this video, you acknowledge that you will not solely rely on the information provided here.** 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to this new podcast episode. Today we will talk about our biggest mistakes in self-publishing with Amazon KDP. My name is Andrea Bernhardt. I've published over 50 high-counter books in the last two years. I've made over half a million dollars. And today, again, is with me my co-podcast companion Tim.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hello. Also, hello from my side. Maybe to mention some numbers here as well from my side. I think I'm now at around 40 books after 10 months. Started last year 2025 in May. Also at around 280k right now in total revenue. Not all high content books, though. For me, I also do some medium content activity books. A good mix, I would say. Yeah, I think today's topic, very interesting uh mistakes from both of us. We've talked about this before. I think a lot of good insights and things to learn from, so you won't do the same mistakes as we did.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Especially for you, Tim, in your situation. What people often don't understand about mistakes in general. They I mean it, of course, it's important to make mistakes and learn from them. But if you want to scale really fast and be very successful in any kind of area and business, you're not really allowed to make too many mistakes at once. And that's why an episode like this is, I think, really valuable for the people. So they they learn from our mistakes instead of needing to make them themselves. Because in your case, you made some bigger mistakes, but you didn't make some essential mistakes that fucked everything up because else you wouldn't have grown so fast. I mean, you were maybe the fastest growing self-publisher. I know that Peter knows a very big publishers.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

I think you are the fastest growing that these people know, so definitely. I think even for me, I came in with a big uh knowledge base before that, and having all the contacts on inside DPE, I was able to avoid like the most critical mistakes, but still the mistakes I made. I think that's just part of everybody's journey. Even if you come in with a big knowledge base already, uh you will still do some mistakes. But I think if I would have heard these mistakes like this before, I would have probably not made them. My first biggest mistake that I made in the beginning was that I didn't put too much attention to bonuses, or I didn't put attention at all to bonuses. Like the first five books or so that I published, they had initially no bonus. Later on, I added the bonus to those books. But by adding no bonus to them, first of all, I missed out on the opportunity to build my email list with them. They made sales, they a lot, yeah. Uh but yeah, I had no way to capture my reader audience, which I later realized was super important. I knew about it in the beginning, but I just in the production process I wasn't really focused on the bonus stuff. And also another thing that I missed out by not adding bonuses, and I one thing that I didn't understand from the beginning is that the bonuses are also working as a sales argument. I know this from Andrei, he uses his value stacking methods. The added bonuses are oftentimes also differentiation or unique selling points to your book. I think that is one thing which I really much neglected. As I mentioned later on, I added bonuses to those books, but still in the initial phases when they had the launch, ads push, etc., they made a lot of sales which I'm not long-term capitalizing on, more or less.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Most people know the benefit of the value stacking. So if you have more bonuses or a unique bonus, for example, if your book has a video course and all the other books don't have a video course, I think it's logical for most publishers that that's beneficial. But the first point you talked about the email collection. A lot of people don't think about that. And that's long-term one of the most valuable things you can do. Building a brand, an email list. If you publish new books in that series, you get reviews way easier.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Yeah. Yeah, it's also the easiest way to turn one sale into two sales. Yeah. Branding benefit of the email list. Super valuable when it comes to reviews. Well, sooner or later, I know from Peter, for example, for his biggest brands, the reviews are completely automated. Just do the email list, ARC list, ARC is an advanced reader copy list. Super, super important. I recommend you from the first book on think about what to add as a bonus, make it as valuable as possible. Also have the system set up for the nurturing, etc., of the email list. Think, or maybe not, I think for the first book, you should pay attention to having a bonus, etc. If you're a complete beginner, focus on getting out your first book. But keep in mind that the whole brand building bonus thing will be very important long term, especially.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

My first mistake that I wrote down is stop production in October, November, December. So in Q4, normally you launch the last book in like if it's late in November for Q4 then, but normally in October, and then I start launching books for the year. So November, December, there's not a lot of publications happening, a lot of launches happening. I learned in the beginning from the German coaches to at least not launch in December because it started to get traction there. I mean, Tim, you had a launch a few days before Christmas, so you disproved that.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Yeah, it was actually on Christmas. We can we can get to this in a second. But I I think in general it makes sense to not launch new books in the heavy Q4 seasonality months because you start out without reviews, and I think especially in those months the ad spend is higher, and it will it makes it less worth harder.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

You can do it, especially if you're advanced. In your case, you had a clear strategy why you did that. But for most people it's not recommended, it's not ideal. So I also paused publishing mid of November normally. But my mistake was not launching, yeah, but to stop production because I thought, okay, I don't launch books in November, December, so I don't really need to focus on production in October, November, December. And then the issue there was that the first book I published this year was in mid of February. And normally I should prepare books in December so I can launch them immediately, beginning of January. Yeah. And I didn't do that, and I lost like one and a half months of books I could have published. And that was a big mistake because I've no, yeah, lost of a big portion of the year that I could could have else published more books this year. Did you do niche research in Q4 while the production was stopped? Or also like like I mean I have my niches selected for the next 30 books I want to publish the next one and a half years, so don't do niche research that active. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

For me, I had a couple of books prepared for like the start of Q1, especially some self-hab books. Self-hab is generally a niche that works very well in January. One of those I launched on the 24th of December, so on Christmas evening day, and it worked out super well. It didn't require much money for this launch to push it to a like mid four-digit PSR.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Around the Sorry for interrupting, but it was the second book of a series without a branding effect.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

I was like I also had the had a branding effect from this book by having a very successful book in that exact niche uh before that for in the same brand. But yeah, it worked out really well, and then like 1st of January, 2nd, 3rd of January, around there, it was also already positioned very well, getting a lot of organic sales, and it has since then been making like 100 to 150 net profit per day consistently. So that worked out pretty well for me. I think what I just had in mind, there are a lot of other niches as well that are performing really good in Q1, especially January, or like the new year switch. And there's one niche, I might not give it away in this video, but I was like super mad at myself that I did not find this because it was VSR top 10 or something, and it's a really easy to create book, and I uh missed the opportunity, but I will for sure attack it next new year. My second mistake in the beginning was that I was too quickly too much focused on publishing a high volume. Almost all my attention went into building a big team, which still made sense, but just in the beginning I was creating the first version of the manuscripts, and I just spent too much time like creating new books, new books in that same type of books. It was short story books, I can say that I believe. And because I put too much time on keeping the production flowing, I kind of neglected the improving thing. It's the same with the bonuses that I mentioned earlier, my first mistake. I think I would have realized that maybe earlier, if I would have spent more time on improving workflows, improving positioning. Third mistake that I will mention in a second also goes together with this. I think I could have spent more time on niche research also or crafting positionings, etc. Also, now looking back at it, my new strategy is more like lower volume, but better positioning, better niche research, better books in general. Not that the first books were bad, they were still, I think, better than most of other books in those niches. Since then I've developed better workflows, better positioning, and that has really paid off for me now. Not going too much into volume, but I think now also is the time where I can go much more into volume publishing now. And it's also worth the more the money because I've lowered the production cost also now. Yeah, I think that sums it up really well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Uh next mistake from you, or I think I can continue with the second one. Too slowly responding to emails that I got from readers. A little bit of context. Your first part, the bonuses. The main reason is that they scan the QR code, add their emails, rebuild an email list, and then use that to communicate with the readers, to build trust with them, ask them for reviews, and so on. Or if we sell other books inside our brands. And what I also do, and that's a really effective strategy, I add my email list at the beginning of the book or at the end of the introduction. I just mentioned hey, by the way, it depends on the book, it's not really appliable for any niche. But for a lot of niches, it makes sense to mention, hey, if you have any questions about the topic of the book, if you want to add something to give us feedback, you can email this. A lot of people contact me, and the benefit if you are really fast responding, and that doesn't mean every day, but if you check the emails four times a week, for example, that's fast enough. Then a lot of people will give you good feedback, and the benefit there, if they write you a long positive feedback, hey, I really like the book, then you can just answer them, hey, I really appreciate that. Um, just so you know, a review of the book would be a big help and support. So if you're open to that, that would be amazing. Maybe also, and that's a very important sentence, maybe also with an image or video of the book that would help you the most. Most people underestimate how many people really leave a positive review if you just do that. And that's why I'm so communicative in my emails. But I had like phases where I just and it took me sometimes two weeks to to check my email list because I think I have four email lists I need to check, and now bundled them into mainly now. It's only two, but I have for each brand an own email list until I now merged them into one support email where I can answer all of them from the same email. But before that, I had to check each of them separately. And then I just neglected one for two weeks or just forgot about it. So I didn't have the time runs too fast and thought, okay, if shit, I need to check my email list. I haven't checked for two weeks. And a lot of people are complaining, of course, or if you then respond to them two weeks later, the effect is lost. If they wrote you great feedback two weeks ago and you answer then today, so two weeks later, yeah. Some of them maybe leave a review then, but the emotion, the positive reaction, positive connection to the book is gone after two weeks. Lost potential. That's a huge mistake because I lost a lot of goodwill of the people, especially if they have to critique or some error, for example, apps linked or video courses, and some people didn't know how to get access properly. And then they write me an email, and then they want, of course, help as fast as possible. And if I don't respond there, respond one week later. They still get the access, but they get the access to the video course one week later. Yeah. And they of course dislike that. That can lead to negative reviews and that's what I wanted to ask.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Has this led to negative reviews?

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Or does luckily nobody somebody wrote something negative because of the not getting access to something of the book? But the good thing, if you collect all the emails from them, if you then reply to them and you apologize and explain yourself, then they normally delete the bad review. Oh, they can do that. Yeah, they can they can also change it to a better review, so they can edit the reviews.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

That's nice to know.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Yeah. Other topic, another tip. But the first one-star review I got for one of my books, it has like 20 reviews, and one one-star review came, and I was like shocked. It was two years ago when I was a beginner. And luckily, the person wasn't just an Amazon customer, but his real name was there. And then I Googled his name, I searched him up on Facebook. I really found the right person, and I wrote him with a screenshot and told him, asked him, Hey, are you the person who wrote that review? Yeah. And then he commented, Yes. He replied really long and said, Yes, I actually like the book, but there were these mistakes, and that's why I wrote the review. So if you want to buy it, in essence, recommend it, but that's the caveat of it. And then so, no, no, I'm the author of the book. Yeah, because I just asked him if this review and he thought I'm a buyer. And I told him, Hey, I'm the author, and I want to apologize, want to give you the money back for the book because you're so dissatisfied with it. And then and I also implemented the feedback you provided to me and uploaded it. So each new customer now has the corrected version of that. Yeah, and then he was super happy about that, changed the review, and he has a five-star review under that book. That's funny.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

So I can I can imagine that's like super premium customers opposite.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Most publishers aren't willing to go this extra mile, but it worked pretty pretty well for me.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

I know that from your email list, people are like they love you too much. Uh Andre has a I think an opening rate of like 60 to 70%, which is completely crazy. Like a normal opening rate of email marketing in general to established email lists is like between 20, 25, maybe 30, but Andre's rate is really crazy. I think your reply rate, message rate, this comes close to the normal opening rate. So 25% of people like message you.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Yeah, if I if I have searched for test readers for my books, so for review copies, I write to my list and then often 10 to 15%, so not 25, but 10 to 15% respond to my email. Okay. That's good. Not of the people who open, but of the entire list, 10 to 15% of the entire list respond.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Fourth of all people who open it respond, and that's crazy. That's super crazy. Yeah, the whole personal connection thing. I think also when it comes to social media, probably you can get a lot of the end contact, etc. The personal connection that really pays off if you can just make your readers happy like this.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

But also, emails are very powerful. I think most people underestimate emails because everybody is just used to emails, it's a professional setting. Yeah. So the M's, some people just are more used to ignoring the M's. But if it's a personal email, so they type in the email, it's written in my book and they write to me and I respond to them personally. They don't ignore my message when I respond to them because it's a one-on-one conversation, also for them, of course. And then the response rate is like 95% of those communications. And then if you ask for a review and they're happy with the book, most of them leave a review.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

That's crazy to be powerful. You have the if you have any questions, improvements, or whatever for the book, you have this email here. Maybe also add a WhatsApp number or a WhatsApp QR code to scan and build like a little WhatsApp email list. Email is the preferred way of contact, but I'm thinking for the kids' activity books where it's like casual books, I could see WhatsApp also being powerful, but I could also see less people wanting to give away their phone number. I think that's an issue.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

I mean, in theory it would work the same, um, but I think emails are still more effective. Yeah. People are just more used to communicate with emails, also with strangers in a way. WhatsApp is then maybe too personal.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Maybe one thing to add there that I've seen from Coco Wio. Coco Wio has on the second page of the book always like uh share your coloring book results on Instagram with us, and they have a QR through their Instagram, and they actually have viral marketing strategy where their users, I don't know if you call it readers for a coloring book, can repost their results from their coloring book and then tag them, and that way they get a lot of snowball effect on social media also. And I'm sure they also get a lot of direct messages on social media. Just something that popped into my mind regarding this whole uh reader management thing. Okay, third mistake from me. Yeah, one thing that was super dumb in the beginning, I have to admit, not exactly copying the title of the competitor, but exactly copying the positioning. So my thought in that moment was okay, I can outperform this person on quality of the book, on quality of the illustrations, quality of the cover, etc. And I'm just gonna take his book, make it much better, switch up the title a little bit, or there was no switch up in the positioning at all, it was the same positioning, just different title more or less. The books still sold. I think they are still at like maybe 100 net profit per month, which is okay, not the world. But I think this exact copying of the positioning was not enough, or is in general not enough to um create a best-selling book or to create a book that really performs like the recent books that are published. And I would not do this again from the beginning. And I think a lot of beginners do this. I see this a lot on Amazon that it's just almost exact copy of the title, different cover. I think that's not the way the way to go.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Yeah, but when I talk about the tech points in niche research, the concept is the biggest attack point. You can copy concept and just make the cover better and everything better. And if the cover was really weak, you could maybe outperform him still. But if he has too many reviews, that's such a huge defense mechanism. You it's hard to attack him like that. But if the concept is different, you are not really competing with him because when they read your concept, it's just so unique that they fall in love with the concept and only want to buy your book. Yeah. And that's why it's always better to create your own concept that helps the customer.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

I think it's I could not say that it's the money wasted spending on this production of the book, that this is wasted money because they still are overall in profit. But I could have done much better performing books in that in that niche. I think this is also something that went together with the publishing too much module. I think it was around four books that where I did this mistake. Could have been avoided, I think, by just maybe this are also just mistakes that I had to make. I don't know if they could have been avoided. Looking back at it now, if I would have not published and just kept learning or something, I would have had less money now. But um yeah, something I wouldn't do again, and I would advise anybody to not to get into positioning, understand positioning. I think Andre's YouTube channel is a good resource for this. Andre's philosophy kind of opened my eyes about this. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

My last one is uh testing too few freelancers before hiring one. Peter always talks about that and preaches about that. That if you want one person, then get 10 people for a test task. I think it's a little bit too much to get really 10 people. I think it did it definitely works with 10. Don't want to really select 10 freelancers and pay all of them for a test task. So I normally do three, sometimes five. But in the beginning I just did one or two, and that's just not enough. So if you want a freelancer as a designer, if you want him as a general freelancer that does like repetitive things, most of my freelancers aren't really skilled in any area, so they are not formatters, they are not ghostwriters, they are not editors, they're just generic freelancers who can do really basic stuff, and I taught them everything. Virtual assistants. Yeah, virtual assistants, yeah. Just can use a computer in the end. But they're the important thing, you don't really test for a result, but you test for how competent are they, how intelligent they seem in their communication, how well they communicate, how fast they respond to messages, how well they are behaving, when they communicate to you. So it's more like soft skills. It's not at all hard skills because, as a personality, a fitting personality that I can work with well, I can teach them everything. All I need from them is that they follow my instructions, watch my Loom videos, and then they use my workflows. For example, if I give them Publish Flow and make them a Loom video, tell them, hey, we have this tutorial videos in Publish Flow, watch them and then create a book with my instructions for you. And then I can just let them give them access and they create the entire book there.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

I think one of the most important skills for me for freelancer is also problem solving. So if are they able to solve problems by themselves without asking me necessarily, or do they even realize problems and then are they able to solve it? And I can say from my set, I think for my designers for my initial short story production system, I wanted 40. Designers, so I wanted to build a team out of four designers so I can keep up the volume. And for that, I tested it. It was over 70 designers on Upwork. Some of them wanted money for the test task. It's important, it's against Upwork TOS to ask for a free test task. So I would never ask for a free test task. A lot of them, I showed them what the test task is, asked them, would you be interested in doing this task? I didn't give them the instructions to do it or anything. But a lot of people just did it. They just do it once you give them the instructions. Maybe they like the workflow and want to try it out. Basically, I already gave them illustration prompts. What they are were supposed to do is create it in AI, look for mistakes, uh, and then assemble all the page in InDesign and Photoshop. So that was the task more or less. And I knew that for one illustration, when they create it in the AI, the AI will for certain make this one mistake. 95% of the time the AI makes this one mistake, which has to lead the freelancer to readjusting the prompt which creates the image, or actually reading the prompt in the first place, so it he understands what is supposed to come out, and then based on the wrong result that will come out, readjust the prompt, regenerate the image, and then continue with the workflow. And it was, I think, five to six people out of 70 people actually paid attention to that and realized the mistake. It was pretty obvious if you read the prompt, which is just uh one, two lines long, you would have immediately recognized that there's a mistake. Yeah, very small amount of people actually like passed the test then. So that's from my point, hiding intentional errors in the task to test their problem solving skills is really important, I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

Okay, I think that's it.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

Yes, sir. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

If you want to see another one of our podcasts, somewhere here in the video should pop up one of our other episodes. Feel free to watch that. I think it's also really valuable.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

And else, any final words to a lot of interesting uh topics about also about to come in this podcast. Um, also, if you like to just hear the audio version of this or save it for later, you can also find the Spotify Apple podcast link below. We will be very happy about the follow there or whatever they they call the button. I think it's follow, yeah. Yeah. Um otherwise, let us know what topics you want to hear. As Andre already I know Andre. Also let us know what topics you would like to hear for the future. Yeah, we're happy about any suggestions or ideas for improvements. Otherwise, see you in the next episode. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Andre.