How to Make Passive Income With Amazon Publishing

Tired of the daily grind? The 9 to 5, punching the clock? Reporting to annoying managers and attending pointless Zoom meetings?

Do you wish there was a better way? Well, you guessed it! There is.

And the key to your dream life can be found in four words: passive income and Amazon publishing.

By using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and other self-publishing tools they offer, you can unlock the life you know you deserve. More flexibility. More free time. More money. More fun and purpose in what you do. And a whole lot more control. 

Even if you’re thinking, "But I'm not a writer!", you might be surprised what you can put together in creating a digital book to sell. With the right mindset and a little effort, anyone can publish a book on Amazon. Think of it like a puzzle—all the pieces are there, it's just up to you to put them together in a way that makes sense for your goals.

So, grab a cup of coffee, and let's dive into the wonderful world of passive income and Amazon publishing. Who knows. Maybe your book will be the next self-published bestseller, and you can finally retire to your own private island or buy that boat you’ve always dreamed of.

We’ll show you step-by-step how to generate passive income on Amazon.

Note: If you want to discover the easiest way to earn passive income on Amazon (without selling physical products), attend our free webinar. We'll show you a scalable way to add more money to your bank account every month...on autopilot. Click here to sign up.

What is Passive Income?

Let’s define passive income first. It sounds kind of boring—but it’s actually one of the top secrets of the wealthy and successful. Your key to achieving those big dreams you have is passive income. 

First, passive income is anything but passive. It’s money that you earn while you’re not doing anything. It generates wealth while you sleep, travel, or do whatever you want to do with your time.

Think of passive income like an apple tree. Once you’ve planted it, watered it and it grows to a certain height, you really don’t have to do that much to reap the benefits of fresh apples. 

Publishing an online book is similar. Once you’ve done the work upfront, you can sit back and let the royalties roll in. 

Active income is the “not-so-great” income. This is where you are trading your time for money. Whether you’re flipping burgers at your local McDonalds, or you’re making a nice six-figure tech salary, you still have to work to get paid. 

Passive income is what you want. Now let’s find out how to get it. 

Here are the top ways you can earn passive income is by launching a book on Amazon Publishing. Even if you just have one book, you can use it in multiple different ways to generate different passive income streams. And the KDP platform gives you access to a giant market of people across the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, India, and many other countries.

Kindle eBook Sales

Once your book is published, the most basic way to make passive income on Amazon is to sell digital copies of your book. Every time a book sells, you’ll make a certain percentage of the sale—called a royalty. 

Amazon offers two different pricing structures and royalty plans. You can set your eBook list price between $.99 and $1.99 and get a 35% royalty rate. Or—the option we recommend—you can set your book’s price between $2.99 and $9.99 and get a much bigger 70% royalty rate. 

Obviously setting your book list price between $2.99 and $9.99 is better since it will give you more money in your pocket. 

Here’s the math. If your eBook sells 1,000 copies at a price of $9.99 (with the 70% royalty), you’ll get $6,993.

Dream big! What if your book sold 1,000 copies each month? Or you published three books that each sold 500 copies a month. And remember, your potential market is not just the United States but all over the world. Don’t limit yourself to what you can accomplish. Figuring out how to price your Kindle book is about testing and scaling up as your gather reviews.

Kindle Select, or Unlimited Page Reads

Independent writers can also enroll in the Kindle Select program. This allows you to create an Amazon revenue stream based on page reads. Think of it like Spotify but for book publishing. Just like musicians get paid a small percentage every time someone listens to their song, you get paid every time someone reads a single Kindle page of your book.

The fine print on this option is you have to give Amazon exclusive rights to sell your book for at least 90 days. But, again, for every page someone reads on their Kindle, you get paid a certain amount. 

The rate you’ll get does change slightly since it’s calculated by how many subscribers are in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program every month. But it generally stays in the same range.

Here are a few examples from Amazon’s page describing the Kindle Unlimited program. 

“Author with a 100-page Kindle eBook that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million x 10,000 pages for this author / 100,000,000 total pages).

“Author of a 200-page Kindle eBook that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $2,000 ($10 million x 20,000 pages for this author / 100,000,000 total pages).

“Author of a 200-page Kindle eBook that was borrowed 100 times but only read halfway through on average would earn $1,000 ($10 million x 10,000 pages for this author / 100,000,000 total pages).”

As you can see, there’s some really good passive income potential for this option.

Kindle Select also gives you access to special promotions that can help more readers find your work. One promotion is called Kindle Countdown Days. For seven days, Amazon will boost your royalty rates up to 70% for eBooks that are $.99 or $1.99.

‍Kindle Vella

Another great Amazon passive income stream is splitting your book into episodes on Kindle Vella. With Vella, you publish your book one short episode at a time. Here’s how it works.

Readers buy tokens to get access to more chapters. Authors then get 50% of the money that comes in from these tokens. Vella is a great way to see firsthand which chapters are the most successful with readers and to connect with readers in a fun, gamified way.

Audiobooks

Finally, you can sell audiobooks. Amazon owns Audible, a company that provides access to digital audiobooks and a wide range of content. 

You can simply convert your book into audio format and now you have another product you can make passive income off of.

Easy!

These are just some of the ways you can generate multiple streams of passive income. Make sure you check out our free training workshop to learn even more tips and tricks on making passive income on Amazon’s platforms. 

One Last Thing

We can’t talk about selling eBooks on Amazon without also talking about marketing. While there are a ton of great AI tools that can help you create a marketing plan—or you can hire someone to help—you’re still going to have to put in some work to spread the word about your book. But this will pay off. As you learn what works, you’ll make more book sales and will be able to create an even better book next time.

So, keep investing in your marketing plan. Do promotions. Hype your book as if it were a gender-reveal party (but less dangerous). The more you market it—whether by going on podcasts to talk about your book, running ads, or with social media campaigns—the more you’ll sell.

We’re not gonna stop saying it. The best passive income strategy we’ve found is leveraging Amazon’s publishing platform. And we think a lot more people should get into this game to share their work and make extra money.

Start today and get those passive income streams going!

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