GSD 214: Can Digital Products Be Sold On Amazon?

Welcome to today’s GSD Daily. Today’s question or topic I should say is, “Can digital products be sold on Amazon?” And the answer is yes. Way back in the day, Amazon was brand new to the ebook world. We were selling PDFs and stuff online. You had to download Adobe Reader. Now, Amazon is a leader in digital publications. However, you have to put your Amazon, your thing inside of Amazon’s formats. So yes, you can upload a PDF, yes, you can do some things, and there are a couple of tools that I want to talk about to make it easy. So the website is kdp.amazon.com, and it’s Kindle Direct Publishing. What it lets you do you can self-publish ebooks and paperbacks for free and reach all of the readers on the Amazon platform. Now, Kindle Direct Publishing used to be, well, it has always been KDP, but there was a service that Amazon bought called CreateSpace.

CreateSpace was what did paperbacks, and then they kind of all jumbled them together inside this Kindle Direct Publishing. It used to be Kindle Digital Publishing. So I’m just logging into my Kindle Direct Publishing account, and there are all kinds of things you can do. Right now we’re about to publish our GSD monthly planner through Kindle, which is nice. It’s in the draft stages right now. But just check out these options. Out of the planner, it was a PDF that we uploaded into the system. We can create a Kindle ebook. We can link an existing Kindle ebook. We can create a hardcover book, or we can link an existing hardcover and we’re creating a paperback here. This is going to be a paperback that is for sale on Amazon. Now, if you look at Funnel Factor here, which is a book of ours that’s on sale, we have a Kindle ebook and a paperback, and we do not have a hardcover yet, but we should.

These are just options. You can do full-size 8 1/2 by 11. You can do normal paperback sizes. It just depends. This is where you can do all of it. You can upload an ebook file and sell it on Kindle. Hence, selling digital products on Amazon. So if we look at Kindle Create, if you could just go to amazon.com/kindle-create, you will end up on this page, and this is a PC and Mac download that allows you to format your books. So you can take your Word documents, your PDFs, whatever, pull them into this Kindle Create folder, and then it lets you format them so they look right on all Kindle devices. It’s a beautiful piece of software. It works very, very nicely.

You can do menus and cookbooks and comic books, all kinds of stuff. It’s a free download too. So you just download it, you log into your Amazon account, and then you start using the software when you’re happy with the book, then you upload it into kdp.amazon.com, and that’s where you set your pricing and all that other stuff. Again, beautiful piece of software for selling your digital products on Amazon. Now, the other Amazon property that you can sell digital products on is Audible. If you go to acx.com, you’ll see how you can turn your book into an audiobook. Now, this is a platform that allows you to either be an actor or a producer. If you already have audio, you can use this platform to upload into Audible Amazon and iTunes. There are lots of ways to use this, but this is a marketplace more than anything else, that helps you turn your book into a digital program.

There again, selling your digital content on the Amazon platform. So ACX is a good place to start. The audible space is a rabbit hole, so you can voice record your book, or you can have somebody else record your book. You can pay other actors and professionals to record your text and upload it through here. There are lots of different ways that you can get uploaded, but Audible, they have very stringent metrics to hit, because it’s Audible, they’re the biggest audiobook provider in the world. So they want to make sure that the stuff you upload is quality, and that the people who are using their platform to pay for it, they’re getting a great experience. Those are, well, two ways to sell your digital products on Amazon. We got KDP and Kindle Create, which allow you to upload your ebooks onto the platform. We have ACX, which allows you to sell your Audible, audiobooks on the platform. If you have any questions at all, then just ask them below this video, and we’ll talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.