How to Start Amazon KDP in 2026 (Full Beginner Tutorial)

So, if you want to get started with Amazon KDP this year, then this video is going to be your complete step-by-step guide. I'll explain to you what is Amazon KDP, how it works, how much people are making, how to get started, how to scale up, and so much more. So, let's get right into it.

Now, if you're new to the channel, my name is Shawn, and I've made over $1. 7 million in actual royalties for my own Amazon KDP businesses. I started publishing in 2016, and I hit $10,000 per month after 10 months.

I built a multiple six figures a year KDP business. I ran that for multiple years, and I eventually sold that first account for $820,000. After I sold the first one, I started another KDP account, which already hit six figures a year, and it's growing from there.

Now, that's cool that I got this result myself, but what is more important is that I've helped over 1,600 plus of my students. It's actually over 1,700 people at this point in my private community to also make money with Amazon KDP. So, we definitely have a strategy that works.

So, with that being said, here is the step-by-step tutorial. So, let's get started with what is Amazon KDP. Well, KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing, and this is Amazon's self-publishing platform.

Basically, it allows anyone to sell books on Amazon. So, you don't have to be an author. Anyone can sign up.

There's no sign-up fee. There's no monthly fee. Nothing, right?

You just sign up to KDP, and you can upload your book file, and your book will be published on Amazon, just like that, okay? So, it is a print-on-demand model, meaning your books are only printed after you make a sale. So, there's no inventory.

Nothing, right? Once you make a sale, then Amazon will print it, and ship it, do the customer service, everything. They handle everything.

And so, this way we can sell ebooks, also paperback books, literal print books, and also audiobooks, all without holding inventory, without having to deal with shipping and handling, customer service once again, those kind of things. Now, why do you want to do Amazon KDP? Well, it has a low upfront cost because, once again, this is a digital product-based business model.

So, there's a lot less fees compared to other business models, like if you do physical products, as an example, right? And it's very beginner-friendly because you don't have to learn how to do shipping and handling. You don't have to do customer service.

You don't have to figure out how to do manufacturing, once again, because it's all digital, right? So, it's very beginner-friendly in that way. You get access to Amazon's massive customer base, and this is a very, very passive business because, once again, Amazon handles so much for you.

And it's print-on-demand means no inventory hassles. Since after we upload the PDF files on Amazon, Amazon handles the rest. We basically skip a lot of the BS that we normally have to do with other business models.

So, how much can you actually make with this? Well, if you click on the first link in the description below, it takes you to a page like this. This is a page to apply for my coaching program.

You don't have to do it. I'm just showing you because if you scroll down here, you can actually see our actual student results, right? So, these are just a few of a lot more that we have, but a lot of our students are doing, you know, thousands of dollars a month, tens of thousands of dollars a month, even very close to $100,000 in a single month, as you can see.

So, if you guys want to, you can click on the link, scroll down, and just, you know, kind of check out these testimonials here. So, whether you just want to make couple hundred bucks, maybe couple thousand dollars on the side as a side income, or you want a full-time income that's going to replace your 9-to-5 job, that is both possible with Amazon KDP. So, one of the biggest factors on how much you can actually make depends on what kind of books you are publishing.

Now, you can make a lot of different types of books, but some books, in my opinion, is easier than others. So, let me tell you what types of books you can create, the difficulty level for each one, and how much you can potentially earn from them. So, essentially, you can categorize the types of books you can create in three different categories.

We have the low-content books. These are the journals, blank books, you know, planners, those kind of things. These are the books that you can create very easily, okay?

And because it's so easy, a lot of people are doing it. So, you have high competition, and because the competition is high, typically, you make less money. Now, if you move up to medium content, medium content has a a more content inside than compared to low content books.

Uh so, these are activity books, coloring books, puzzle books, those kind of things. And because it's a little bit harder to do, right? Less people are doing it, which means you have less competition.

I would say this is about a medium competition, okay? And for that reason, you will make a little bit more money. Medium income, okay?

Now, the last one is high content books. So, this has more content inside, typically a lot of images, a lot of text, right? So, these are fiction books, non-fiction books, and also workbooks.

And because it's a little bit harder to create these books, there are less people doing it. A lot of people aren't willing to do the hard things, right? So, you have a lot less competition, and for that reason, you can often get a bigger share of the market, so you'll make more money.

Now, this all depends because there are books in the low content category that are absolutely crushing it, making a ton of money. And there are books in the medium content category that's also crushing it. But, in general, I would say it is better to try to move up the content ladder, creating books that are harder to replicate, so your competition cannot easily come in.

But, let me show you some examples here. So, starting with the low content books, we're talking about these books, right? Literally, it's just a blank journal, super easy to create, okay?

You're just repeating the blank pages, and you just have the book ready to go. So, the cost for these are often free, right? You can create these books for free in Canva or anything else, just copy-pasting the templates.

And for the difficulty, it's super easy to make, even without experience. So, I actually think low content book is a great way to get started if you're doing Amazon KDP, not to make 10K a month or crazy amount of money, but just to practice, right? And learn the process.

So, I think for that, low content books are really good. And once again, if you do it right, you can make a lot of money. So, this book right here, very simple, blank journal on things I need to write down because I'm old and I forget stuff.

So, it is a funny gift type of book, and I have this tool called BookBeam, right? So, it tells me how much the book is making. And this book is making 38 to 55 dollars every single day in actual royalties.

So, that is 1,200 to 1,500 dollars a month from this one very, very simple book. So, if you find good angles and good niches like that, you can still make money with low-content books. Now, if you guys want a step-by-step tutorial on how to create these types of books, then I do have a separate YouTube video.

I'll just leave a link in the description below. Next one is medium-content books. So, typically for the cost, it really depends, but if you are trying to create puzzle books like these ones, word search, crosswords, cryptograms, those kind of things, you can use paid tools like BookBolt to create them, and that is 20 bucks a month.

So, it's not too bad, right? And for coloring books, people use AI. It's not the best way to create coloring books.

You can also hire custom illustrators, and that'll cost a little bit more, but it's still going to be on the cheap side, okay? So, in terms of the difficulty, it's a little harder to create, once again, because you have more content inside the book. It's not just blank pages, right?

But, for that reason, it's less competition. So, customers get more value from your book uh because it has more content, right? And they can actually engage with a book, so you can often price it higher, and so you make more money per sale, which is another reason why you typically make more money with these types of books.

So, looking at these books on Amazon, this one, The Big Book of Large Print Word Search Puzzles, it is a compilation of 224 puzzles, okay? This book is doing $84 to $138. So, that is around $3,000 a month.

And this book is a Cozy Girl Coloring Book, so it's a simple coloring book. You will have to hire a illustrator to create these books, or if you can draw it yourself, then that is obviously amazing because you can create these books for free, right? If you have the art skills, but this book is doing between $337 to $569 every single day.

So, that is around $10,000 per month just from this one book. All right, so how do you create these types of books? Well, I actually have a bunch of tutorials, so let me show you a couple of them, okay?

So, the first one is how to create coloring books. So, I do have a step-by-step tutorial on getting started with using AI to create coloring books. Like I said earlier, it's not the best way.

It's probably not the way to make $10,000 per month, but if you just want to get started, get your practice in to creating coloring books, then this is a good step-by-step tutorial. So, the link is below this video. Same as couple tutorials on how to create story books.

Story books are a great example of a medium content book. So, I have two tutorial videos on that. And also, I have couple more activity book tutorial like creating puzzle books.

So, I got a bunch of tutorials you guys can follow all in the description below. And the last one is high content book. So, this costs most, but like I said, it could be the most profitable.

So, in terms of cost, it really varies. If you are writing the book yourself, I will say the cost is 100 bucks, right? For, you know, outsourcing the formatting for the book cover, but the rest you're doing it yourself.

If you are outsourcing the writing, hiring a ghostwriter to write these books for you, then it can go up all the way to $1,500 per book, okay? And because not a lot of people are willing to make that investment, you have the least competition in these books often times can make a lot of money. So, another pro of high content book is that you can easily create a brand, and you can also leverage and use AI tools costs down.

So, the highest cost, right? The most expensive can go up to 1,500 bucks. But, there are many, many ways to cut costs down, especially with AI nowadays, right?

So, instead of hiring a ghostwriter, you can try to write these books yourself, partially yourself, but also using AI as a tool. Also, nowadays ghostwriting companies are coming up with AI writing packages where they use AI plus a human editor to go and edit the content, which is what we want. And those are around $500 to $600.

So, in terms of how much these books can actually make, well, this book is making $500 to $800 a day just from the paperback. So, just from the paperback, this is doing between $15,000 to $24,000 a month. But, this is the thing with high content books.

You can sell your book in many different formats. Unlike with low content, medium content, you usually can only sell it as a paperback. With high content, you got the ebook, you got the audiobook, and audiobooks are super, super profitable.

This is another example of a high content book. So, this is a chair yoga for weight-loss and toning book. Just from the paperback book, it is doing between $300 to $454 a day.

So, now that you have a better idea of the types of books you can create, the next thing I want to talk about is setting up your account. Now, before we move forward, it is very important to understand, number one, you can only have one Amazon KDP account. So, if you already have an Amazon KDP account, then do not try to create a new one.

Having multiple account is against Amazon's terms and conditions. Since I already have an Amazon KDP account, really show you step-by-step how to create one because then I'll be opening up another one, and that is against the terms and conditions. So, instead, I found this website or a blog post that basically walks you through how to do that.

It's not my site, but it's super helpful, so I'll just leave a link to this in the description below. Once you have your KDP account created, then it is time to upload our books. This is a pretty simple, straightforward step, but if I show you step-by-step, it's going to be a super long video.

So, once again, I do have a separate, step-by-step tutorial video for this, so I'll leave a link in the description below. This video made it super easy for you to just follow and upload your book. But, in this video, I basically explain how to enter the book details, you know, the whole uploading process, the KDP royalties, you know, what kind of pricing you should go for, and also what you need to know for the printing cost.

Once you upload the book, it'll be between 24 to 72 hours for your book to be approved and show up on Amazon. Sometimes KDP do reject your book, but they always tell you what the problem is. Meaning, you can just fix it and resubmit it again.

So, once your book is live on Amazon, the next step you have to take is to get some reviews. Because this is a very important thing that you have to understand. The first 30 days of your book being live on Amazon, Amazon gives your book a preferential treatment.

It'll rank your book higher, it'll show it to more people, and essentially, it gives you more chances for your book to sell. We call this the honeymoon period, and the reason why Amazon do this is they are essentially testing your book to see if it's worth pushing it more, or if they should just drop it down the pages. So, we obviously want Amazon to promote our books.

So, we need to show Amazon that our books are good, right? People are enjoying it. So, the best way to do that is to get some reviews.

And by doing so, Amazon will push it to more people, it'll rank higher, and it'll start getting more and more sales. So, this is the free review method, and step one is to find Facebook groups in your niche. There's essentially a Facebook group in literally every single niche.

So, whatever book you're publishing, if you look up a Facebook group for it, you most likely will find it. Step number two is to join the group and ask if anyone would be interested in reading your book for free in exchange for an honest review. So, Amazon actually allows you to give out a free copy of your book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a standard practice in the publishing space called giving out a ARC copy. So, ARC stands for advanced reader copy, and once again, this is allowed. So, once you make a post in the group, you will have people reaching out saying, "I want a free copy of the book, right?

" So, you would just send them the PDF file of the book. You don't have to give them a physical copy of the book, just PDF, so it's free. Okay?

And they will start reading the book, and you basically want to just follow up with them. So, you want to reach back out saying, "Hey, how did you like the book? If you enjoyed it, do you mind leaving a review on Amazon?

Here you'll send the Amazon link to your book and politely ask for a review. And you will do this with multiple people, and that is how you can collect some reviews for free. So, that was the complete free way.

Obviously, you know, when something is free, it takes more time. So, you will have to spend more time, you know, kind of talking to people and following up and stuff like that. rather spend a little bit of money to save some time, then there is a paid way to get some reviews.

So, at the moment, the easiest way to get reviews is using a site like Book Bounty. This is like a book club membership site that allows you to get a ton of reviews. Essentially, the way it works is authors sign up to this website.

They review other people's books, they obtain points, and they can use those points to request a review for their book. So, it's like authors helping each other. Now, they do have a system that prevents you from directly review swapping, which is not allowed by Amazon's, you know, guidelines.

So, the good thing is, as you can see, they do prevent you from doing so. So, it is a very effective way to get reviews. I use it all the time.

A lot of people use it. So, if you want to check it out, I'll leave a link in the description, as always. But, one thing I will say is you don't want to rely on just one way of getting reviews.

You want to use a bunch of different ways to get reviews so that you have the best chance of getting the most amount of reviews, right? Try not to rely on just Booksprout or just Facebook groups. What I recommend is you do both.

So, if you do want to check out Booksprout, they do have a 15-day free trial. And in terms of the price, it is 25 bucks a month if you do the monthly, or 15 bucks a month if you do the yearly. So, if you want to learn even more methods on getting reviews, then I'll leave a link to this video which talks about other strategies as well.

So, once you get reviews, the next step is to market your book. So, marketing is absolutely crucial. You cannot just upload the book and forget about it.

Because nowadays, creating a book is getting easier, right? Because AI and different tools out there that allows you to create books fast. But, for that reason, if you're just creating the book and uploading it, that is something that most people can do.

And if you're doing something most people can do, you cannot expect to make a lot of money. Like, if you want to make 10K per month as an example, right? You cannot expect to make 1% income with a 99% work ethic.

If you're doing the same thing as 99% of other people, you're not going to be making 1% income. Well, the good news is everyone can create a book and upload it to Amazon. But, very few people understand marketing.

So, that is how you will stand out. So, like every step of the process, there's a free way and a paid way of doing this. So, even with marketing, there's a free way to market your book, okay?

So, this book absolutely blew up last year. It made a lot of money. Right now, it's doing between 200 to 400 dollars.

But, at its peak, this book literally made millions. And how did they do it? Well, they used social media marketing.

So, social media marketing is becoming more and more popular nowadays to promote your book. And the great thing is, with short-form content blowing up, you don't have to create like crazy, in-depth videos, right? So, these are the videos that they're posting.

And these are the ones that went super viral. 35 million views, 29 million views, and 69, basically 70 million views. And if you watch the video, it's literally just ordering your book, opening up one page, and you're just reading it.

You're not even doing the exercise, you're not even showing your face, you just have the camera, and you're just reading the exercises, right? And since this is a guided journal, they're just reading the guided journal prompts. And it got almost 70 million views, absolutely blew up, made a crap ton of sales on their books, and that's what they're doing.

So, the key to social media marketing is not to be fancy, not to, you know, have super high production, but the key is you just have to be consistent. They show up every single day and post at least one video a day, if not multiple videos every single day, and that is what you have to do. Each video only gets a couple hundred views, as you can see, but sometimes it blows up.

So, you want to think of marketing as a skill in itself, it's something you develop as you go. Just like writing a book or designing a book cover, it is a skill that you can learn. Learning how to market yourself and learning how to market your book, whether that is through social media, email newsletters, or building an author brand, that makes the difference between a average publisher and a best-selling publisher.

So, that was social media marketing, but you can also run ads if you want quick results, because with social media marketing, it takes a little bit of time to get the momentum going. Well, with Amazon Ads, you can just pay a little bit of money and instantly have your book seen to a ton of people. So, this one, once again, I'll leave a link to the step-by-step tutorial video in the description.

You guys can start following it, you guys can start testing those strategies, but I will say that, you know, if you're not a numbers person or if you never ran ads before, and you might be overwhelmed a little bit saying, "Oh my god, this is too techy, I cannot do this, this and that. " Do not worry. Once you learn it, it's basically the same thing over and over and over, so it's a lot simpler than you think.

So, once you go through all these steps, the next thing you want to understand is how to scale from there. So, we published our first book, we got some reviews, we were marketing it, we're making some sales, right? So, how can we go from there to making over 10k per month?

Well, these are the steps, okay? So, you want to reinvest the profits that you're making into creating more books and marketing. Do not try to take your profits out so soon.

Like, if you're just making a couple hundred bucks a month, those couple hundred bucks is not for you to go and, you know, spend it outside of the business. Take that money and reinvest back into the business. Create more books, do more marketing.

You want to hire people, like book cover designers, ghostwriters, right? People who can format the book nicer. Basically, improve the entire process, okay?

So, over time, you're going to improve the book quality, you'll also publish more books, and you will get better at marketing, okay? Those are the three things that you want to keep focusing on. Now, you want to ask yourself, what's more important, time or money, right?

So, in the beginning, you most likely don't have a lot of money to invest, which means you will invest your time to do more of the things yourself. So, you're essentially creating the book yourself, maybe making a book cover, maybe doing the marketing. That is fine, right?

It's going to save you a lot of money, but you're investing a lot of time. Well, as you make more money from your business, you want to slowly buy back your time, meaning you're going to start replacing yourself. You're going to hire a Amazon Ads specialist to, you know, run ads for you.

You're going to hire a book cover designer to create book covers for you. You're going to hire a ghostwriter to create write books for you. So, it's going to cost money, but it's going to replace you and save you time.

And eventually, you're going to be like a CEO, right? You're not doing any of the work yourself. You're just overseeing everyone doing the work for you.

You're going to have a little team going, and that is how you can keep making more books, keep marketing it, keep making money from this business without actually doing the work yourself. And this is how you can make a lot of money from KDP while working literally like an hour a week, which is how much I work, right? An hour a week or so.

I got students doing, you know, 30, 40, 50k, even more a month, and they also work like one to two hours a week on this business. So, that is definitely what you want to work towards. Here are some examples of people that you can hire as part of your team.

So, if you need help with formatting your book, then you can hire someone like this on Fiverr. For $50, he can format your book interior. And if you want a little bit more of a premium high-end formatting, then you can use a gig like this.

For $90, you can get a pretty sweet formatting for your book interior. It's very, very professional. Same as book covers, right?

You can actually start outsourcing your book cover for literally five bucks, 10 bucks on sites like Fiverr. This is a $10 gig, and these are the samples that you can see that they are creating. So, some are okay, some are really good.

Uh so, it's, you know, it really depends on how much you work with the designer. So, it's not like it's completely hands-off. You still have to give them, you know, examples and what kind of designs you want.

But, I will say for 10 bucks, this is pretty good. And it's definitely better than what I can create myself if I just would use Canva or something. And if you're willing to pay a little bit more, then this gig is also good.

For $35, you can get a ebook cover that looks really, really nice. And these are some examples. So, if you're curious how I got started, I actually bought two courses when I first got started with Amazon KDP.

I went straight into investing into courses because I wanted to shortcut the process. I knew that if I would try to figure this out myself, I would waste way too much time, right? And even though I was only making about 3K a month from my full-time job, and obviously I will have to spend some money from there to live off of it, I was still willing to invest into the business early on to save me some time, okay?

So, I bought two courses. I outsourced, you know, a lot of tasks to create multiple books at the beginning while making around 3K a month from my full-time job. And I also invested $6,000 into one-on-one coaching literally after making $1 from Amazon KDP, right?

So, after I published my first book and I made my first sale, that was my first dollar I ever made online. And this is after failing for four straight years in different business models, right? So, I tried different businesses and I failed for four straight years, never made any money.

And then all of a sudden with KDP, I published one book and a couple days later I make my first sale. And I'm like, that is crazy. This business is so much easier than other businesses that I went all in to the point where I hired someone for 6K, right?

And that was my life savings at that point at age 21 or something. So, maybe that was too much of a jump, but the same thing, right? I wanted to save time.

I wanted to go as quickly as possible. So, I invested the money. And I ended up scaling to 10K per month after 10 months.

Okay? So, I think I did it fairly quickly there. But since then, I've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in coaching and paid resources over my lifetimes.

So, I am a believer in spending some money to shortcut the process, but that is just me, right? This is your life. You do whatever, you know, you want to do, whatever you feel comfortable with.

But the point is you're always spending money or time. You choose which you want to spend. What I will say though is that you have to understand what's your time worth, right?

If you work a job, and let's say you make 20 bucks an hour, but then you go and spend 5 hours creating a book cover on Canva because you don't want to save five bucks or 10 bucks that you could have outsourced to get a book cover done, you instead want to save the money and spend 5 hours creating the book yourself, which means you just lost $100 worth of your time if you're making 20 bucks an hour, right? Basically 20 bucks an hour times five. And most likely, that $100 worth of book cover that you created yourself, if you're not a designer, that book cover is probably worse than what you could have got for five bucks on Fiverr hiring someone who has more experience, right?

So, entrepreneurship is basically knowing where to invest your time and money, being smart with your resources. And so, that's why I personally think outsourcing some parts of the business in the beginning, even if you're low on a budget, makes sense. But once again, this is your life.

You do whatever you think is best. So, that was the overview of how to start Amazon KDP this year. So, your next step is to go and watch the many, many tutorial videos that I linked in the description and start taking action.

Now, watching those videos is a great way to get started, but if you're really serious with this business, right? And if you want to go as quickly as possible, then I do have my complete Amazon KDP coaching program. So, this is not just a course, right?

This is a complete A-Z video course. So, you have the course to follow, but you also get one-on-one coaching, group coaching calls, the community, the private community to ask questions. Essentially, this is a course and coaching hybrid offer, okay?

So, we will literally sit down with you one-on-one, check your book topic, check your book cover, book title, you know, those kind of things. Because a lot of times when people just watch YouTube videos or courses, they still don't really get it. They still make the same mistakes when it comes to keyword research, book title, book cover, to the point where we determined that we really need to offer one-on-one coaching to prevent people from messing up.

Because if we don't do this, essentially what's going to happen is a lot of people will create a book in a topic that no one's interested in or, you know, a horrible book cover or something like that. They'll make the mistakes, and they spend a lot of time and energy creating the book only for it to not sell. And they get discouraged, and they quit.

And we don't want that. So, I do think the one-on-one calls are super, super important. And a lot of our students are absolutely loving it since we started offering this.

So, you get that as well. But anyways, you can check out the first link in the description and just scroll down this page to learn more about, you know, what is included in this offer. Basically, if you scroll past the testimonials, you'll see all the modules, you'll see the bonuses, what is included, right?

And then from here, even if you want to join, you literally cannot join. You have to apply here to book a call, and on that free call that we do, we'll talk to you, answer your questions, and if we determine that this is a good fit for you, then we'll offer you to join, right? But a lot of times we also decline people to join because, maybe, you know, the vision that you have in the business is not the same as what we can teach.

A lot of people are stuck on, you know, the type of book that they want to create. And sometimes we're not specialized in those kind of books. So, we don't have the confidence that we can coach you.

And I can promise one thing, and that is that if we genuinely feel like we cannot help you, then we will not try to sell you on this, right? So, it's just a super casual call. So anyways, if you're interested, once again, the link is in the description.

But with that being said, hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, leave a like, subscribe, comment any questions you have, and thank you so much for watching. I'll see you guys in the next one.

Bye.