Passive income: Lessons learned for my first Amazon KDP book sale

Abir
4 min readAug 30, 2024

Yes I did it ! I sold my first book on KDP !

Photo de Mike Hindle sur Unsplash

It’s been over a year since I discovered Amazon KDP and the possibility of creating and selling our own books without the need for an editor or the traditional (and long) publishing process.

I have many book ideas, but I started with the simplest: generating a coloring book with AI. I picked a theme, used Canva AI for the graphics, and published the book. It took me about a week between creating and choosing the graphics, formatting, and going back and forth with KDP to get it compliant and ready to publish. To start, I set a small commission for myself to get the lowest price.

Don’t expect big earnings; the competition is fierce. A physical book has production costs, so the selling price needs to cover printing, Amazon’s commission, and still remain reasonable to compete and find a place in the market.

I was super excited the first few weeks, checking my KDP account daily, but I didn’t sell a single copy of my “book” (I’m not even sure I can call it that…). So I gave up and forgot about it.

To my surprise, a few months ago, I got a payout email from Amazon with a small amount. I didn’t pay much attention to it. Then, a few weeks ago, the same email came again, so I checked my KDP…

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Abir

IT working girl. Interested in many topics such as project management, self help, tech and trading. Writes in French and English