Yes I did it ! I sold my first book on KDP !
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 dashboard. And there it was, I’d sold two copies! I really didn’t expect that after almost a year of disappointment.
But something shattered my excitement. I found a comment from someone who bought my book. The lady was very disappointed and said in her review that the book had no added value and was crude. And I think she’s right. That turned all my excitement into disappointment and a guilty conscience. I felt like I’d cheated and sold this lady a bad product. And the amount earned wasn’t even worth it (0.18 euros per copy sold).
Generating passive income is great. But selling people crap is not!
And now what ?
I created a second activity book in Arabic for children. It’s ready to publish and only needs to be uploaded. I put real effort into creating it. It’s not AI generated. I spent time on it, showed it to my friends to get their feedback, and made corrections based on that. But today I am not able to publish it on KDP. I was surprised that Arabic isn’t supported by KDP. Yet Hebrew is. Arabic and Hebrew are very similar, and their main challenge is that they’re written from right to left, and the book itself needs to be opened and read from right to left. So technically, this right-to-left problem is solved if Hebrew is supported. I’m eagerly waiting for Arabic language support in KDP.
But aside from this already created book, I’m unsure if I’ll continue publishing new ones. I don’t have the same motivation anymore. I’ve also had major changes in my personal life and don’t have the same time to dedicate to these activities. But if I do, I’ll try to produce something of higher quality.
I also want to publish a second edition of my coloring book with improved quality, or perhaps remove it from Amazon altogether. I don’t want to sell people something mediocre. And for the next edition, I need to order a hard copy to see what it actually looks like. It’ll cost me more than I earned from it, but it’s not a big amount (< 5 euros) and it’ll be a keepsake. More importantly, it’ll let me see what I’m actually selling to people!
