With the advent of Kindle Direct Publishing, becoming a published author is a lot simpler today than it used to be. While it is much harder to become an overnight success, making six-figures publishing books, it’s not difficult to use Kindle Direct Publishing as a way to gain authority within your niche.
When you become a Kindle author you can fill out an Amazon Author’s profile and page. On the page you will get a short biography space, a place for a headshot, a link to your blog, an area to share videos, photos, social media and more. You can automatically feed your blog into your profile as well as your Twitter feed. Of course, all the books you’ve written will appear in your profile too.
Once you publish a book on Kindle, you can use that book to market your real business almost effortlessly. Link to the book on your website, reference it in your profiles and biographies when you guest blog, or write articles for others – whether online or in print. Mentioning the book you wrote is a great way to build authority among your audience.
Kindle books don’t have to be super long. In fact, you can turn most of your eBooks that you already have (and that you wrote yourself) into Kindle books and have them published within just a few hours. Think of Kindle Direct Publishing as another medium to distribute content, like your blog, YouTube, Google+ and Facebook.
The more Kindle books that you publish, the better for your expertise status. Some popular coaches publish a book every month. It’s a good way to get buzz because every book that is published should be promoted via all social media networks, blogs and via press release. Each published book is an event and an opportunity to talk about your business and what you do.
If you sign up for Kindle Direct Publishing Select (KDP Select) they’ll promote your book for you, for a period of time, and you’ll earn a 70 percent royalty if you sign up for the KDP select program. This means you’re promising that you won’t publish the book elsewhere for a specific period of time. So, if you are republishing works that you’ve already published you cannot use KDP Select, but consider using it for new books.
In addition, through Kindle, you can actually give your book away free as a gift to select individuals if you know their Kindle email address. This is a good way to get Amazon book reviews, as well as give away prizes to people who (for example) attend a live event, call in on a radio show, or sign up for your newsletter.
What’s truly amazing about the potential with Kindle Publishing is that you can also hire a ghostwriter to write the entire book for you, which you can then use as a marketing tool for your business. If you really want to be known as an authority figure within your niche, consider marketing your content via Kindle for amazing results that can’t be matched by other methods of content distribution.