Research for Your Kindle Book [KOCPU #2]
By now you have a category, but before you start writing you should invest some time in research.
The best kind of research is, obviously, to buy a lot of the books you found on top 20 in your category, read them and take notes.
Analyze each book for how it’s structured, how the cover looks, and how the description is written.
You should also check customer reviews. What are people happy for and what do they dislike.
In a perfect world, you should do this kind of research. It will be time-consuming, though, and it will cost you money for the books.
A faster and pretty good method is to do your research mostly from what you see on Amazon.
You can look inside books and read the table of contents as well as 10% of the text.
You can go through reviews. You can learn a lot from what people are saying about these books.
Take notes. What should your book contain? What would be nice if it contained, but not necessary?
Spend an hour today and an hour tomorrow researching your category.
If you have more time and can go in-depth with your category, it’s even better of course, but if you want fast results, do as best you can with the little time you have.
Speaking of time...
Make sure you measure your time. It has several advantages:
- You’ll stay focused on your work, because it takes an effort to pause the timer, switch to something else, start the timer again and go back.
- You know how much time tasks really takes, not just what you think they’ll take.
- If you give yourself deadlines, you’ll work faster and more focused.
- It will become fun. You’ll be keeping up the good work, because you already have a history of tracked time, and you don’t want to break the chain.
- You’ll have more writing done in less time, in other words: Be more productive.
- More writing done = more money on your account.
So make sure to measure your time.
I’ve been using Kanbanflow.com for this for years, except for the tasks where I used Toggl.com
Great tips here for researching your Kindle book!
When I wrote a few kindle books in the past, I liked to look at the table of contents of books on the same subject I was going to write. This helped create the outline for my own book, and I was also able to add in information that may not have been covered in other books already out there.
That's a good way to get inspiration for content, especially since you use what they didn't cover. Another good place to look is in the reviews.
I'm not too sure of what a Kindle book is but from reading this post I am now curious to find out and perhaps write one of my own. Can I write it?
I think you can, yes. I think they cover most countries.
A Kindle book is an ebook sold on Amazon. You can sign up to publish your own Kindle books for free on kdp.amazon.com
The Kindle book has revolutionist the publishing world and given the chance to millions of writers who otherwise wouldn't get published.
Wow. That sounds amazing. So I can actually become a published author? But then how do you go about finding sponsors and putting the book out there?
I don't find sponsors.
This is how it works (and I should write a post about that):
You write a book in Word, Scrivener or other word processor.
You sign up with kdp.amazon.com for free.
You upload your book - the document file.
And hit Publish.
You can see the books I've published there under my own name: http://author.brittmalka.com
Anybody can do that - to my knowledge. I haven't heard of any country restrictions.
And sales? Pricing?How does that side of things work?