🧠 Making $1000s /month with Amazon KDP ft. Jamie Northrup
How to Market Any Product and How a Billionaire Hides His Money
What’s up party people! Happy Sunday!
Before we dive into today’s idea, let’s connect on Twitter!
And if you have any ideas for this newsletter, check out our suggestion box!
1. Business idea of the Week: Make $1000s Monthly with Amazon KDP
This week’s idea is brought to you by Jamie Northrup, the creator of the Minimalist Hustler Daily newsletter.
Each day he shares 3 quick & valuable resources that will help you make more money online.
Today he’s sharing his top income source.
The idea: Self-publish a book with no/little writing in it.
Imagine you create a book with little to no words inside, publish it on Amazon, and get paid royalties every month from it.
Even if you only made a few bucks from 1 book, you could scale up to hundreds of books like I do, and earn a lot more.
We aren’t talking about writing a novel or guide here, this is a low/no content book with little to no writing at all like:
Notebooks
Journals
Planners
Workbooks
Activity Books
Coloring Books
And Many More
How to get started: There’s a small learning curve to get started, so I suggest you start with the simplest of books: a blank notebook.
There are 5 major steps to getting started.
Step #1: Sign up for a self-publishing platform.
Go open your account(s) for the self-publishing platform(s) of your choosing. Start with Amazon KDP, where you can sign up using your regular Amazon account (& it’s free!)
Step #2: Create the manuscript (interior).
Create a PDF of the manuscript and all the pages inside the book. You can use any program you like to do this (ex. Canva). There are many different page counts, paper types, and sizes you can use, but to get you started I have included a 5x8, 60 pages with college-ruled pages (with bleed) PDF you can use as a starter.
Download your free interior here.
Step #3: Create the cover of the book.
Create a single PDF with the front cover, spine, and back cover.
Again, there are many different ways to do this, but I use Canva as it's free and easy to use.
The first thing you need to do is determine the size of the cover design you need, which varies depending on the number of pages, paper type, and sizes of the pages.
The best way to find this is to use the KDP Paperback Cover Template Creator.
Once you have that you can upload it to Canva, and set the dimensions (in inches not pixels) to what the template says based on the following equations:
Canva Width = 2 * Book Width + Spine Width + 0.25 Inches
Canva Height = Book Height + 0.25 Inches
For our interior here's what the Canva dimensions should be.
2 * 5 + 0.14 + 0.25 = 10.39 Inches (Canva Width)
8 + 0.25 = 8.25 Inches (Canva Height)
Now you that you have your template, you’ll know where to put your designs and text. Once you're done, delete the template leaving only your design, and save it as a PDF
Step #4: Submit your book to Amazon.
Upload the cover, and interior, and fill out the listing form.
It’s pretty straightforward, but make sure you choose paperback and not ebook (unless you’ve created a book that doesn’t need to be written in).
Step #5: Promote your book.
If you have a well designed book in a popular category without too much competition, you’ll get organic sales from Amazon.
On top of that, you can use social media, directories, blogs, and email to promote your book.
I created a side hustle quickstart guide for Amazon KDP you can download for free that has a bit more info to help you.
And that’s a wrap!
2. How to Market Any Product
Marketing can seem like a complicated subject. It comes in many different forms like social media, blog posts, tv ads, etc.
But without understanding this one ide, your marketing won’t work.
What’s the idea? No one cares about your product.
Literally no one.
But you know what they do care about?
They care about what your product can do for them. And that’s what your marketing needs to tell them.
Don’t tell them why your product is so great.
Tell them how much time it will save them, or how much money it will make them.
Explain to them how your product will take them from a small Mario and make them a big Mario.
And that’s how marketing works.
Credit: Shaan Puri’s LinkedIn post
3. How a Billionaire Hides His Money
Meet 83-year-old Ed Bosarge.
Ed comes from a humble beginning, but he has a very special talent.
Ed is really good at math.
Ed worked on the NASA Saturn rocket project at IBM and earned a Ph.D. at Brown University, but that’s not what made him rich.
Ed founded Quantlab - an “automated proprietary trading firm” that makes A LOT of money.
It’s estimated Quantlabs generates more than $3 billion in profits, of which Ed takes 70%.
So now that we know how Ed makes his billions, let’s look at where he puts it.
Ed likes to buy expensive houses all around the world.
Like this mansion in Houston that he’s currently selling for $36 million:
Or this 72-acre island in the Bahamas:
But the way in which Ed purchases these properties is the real secret.
All of Ed’s properties and assets are purchased into Trusts, which makes it very easy to hide what he actually owns.
And this all became apparent when he filed for a divorce from his wife, and tried to cut her out of all of his wealth. When Ed married his wife back in the early 90s, he didn’t have any wealth and didn’t put a prenup in place. So when his wife received the divorce papers she assumed she’d be entitled to 50% of his wealth, because that’s how Texas marriage law works… But Ed had other plans.
Ed claimed that all of the assets were owned by a collection of trusts spread out all over the world. He claimed that he personally has only $25 million worth of assets that his wife is entitled to. And because of the way Trust laws work, it looked like his wife was sh*t out of luck.
But she wasn’t willing to go down without a fight. This case is being handled in an expensive legal battle, just as you’d expect.
So what can we learn from this? If you make billions of dollars → learn how to use a Trust.