Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper interview Jenny Hansen Lane about selling books on Amazon KDP.
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Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode we have a special treat. We are joined with Jenny with Jenny Hansen Lane. We're so excited to talk to her about kind of flipping some content today. Super excited to dig deep into her business and learn more about this type of flipping that she does.
Melissa: Yeah, i'm excited about this to dive into all the things that she's doing with these selling these books on amazon, but it's so cool what you're doing So I we're excited to have you here Jenny.Welcome.
Jenny: Thank you. It's always fun to hang out with you guys. And this is really odd. We have hung out more in person than we have online together, which is really cool.
Melissa: That is odd for our business. Like, cause we're on, we're digital. So we actually, yeah, we met at the conference.
Rob: A couple years ago. A blogging or podcast.
And yeah, we clicked and it was pretty, pretty cool to, yeah, like learn more about you and just build a friendship with you.
So for the last couple of years, it's been pretty exciting to do that. So.
Melissa: So we're excited to dive into what you're doing. So give us a little background, on what exactly it is, how you're making an extra income and helping other people make an extra, extra income from selling books. Kind of give us, like maybe how you started and then what it's growing into.
Jenny: Great question. So during COVID, I had an online course that I was like so pumped about. I was scaling it. But when COVID happened, the price to acquire a customer with Facebook ads went through the roof. So I was like, you know, this isn't as fun as I thought it was going to be. I need something more that doesn't, you know, force me to show up on Zoom if I can't, or answer emails if I don't want to.
I'm a mom of three kids, so it was kind of like, I don't ever want to get in a position where I have to pick between those two things, like hanging out with my kids. And so what I decided to do is like, I'm going to take my book I'm going to take my course and like maybe I can make it in a book because you don't have to answer an email with a book and you don't have to show up on a zoom call.
So I started researching self publishing because I'm kind of a bootstrapper at heart and I knew I didn't have the funds to hire a traditional publisher. I really didn't know that much about it, but I knew like YouTube is a wonderful world or a dumpster fire, right? I just had to find the right content to follow.
And so once I was on, learning about Amazon KDP, I realized that you didn't necessarily have to write a full book to make money. And at this time, I was almost done with my first book. This is the whole reason that I was like looking for self publishing and I realized, oh, people are doing notebooks and journals and planners and they're solving a different problem than writing 60,000 words.
And so I thought, well, I'll just try this, did a couple journals. The first month I made like $18 and I was like, that's cool. That was like bread and milk and chicken. And I didn't have to leave the house and I didn't have to answer a zoom call. And if anyone out there is listening that like runs a business online, sometimes it's nice just to have that reprieve to just like take a break when you don't want to do those things. And so I was like, what if I 10x this? And so I published 200 books in 30 days and you can repurpose a lot of the content because you own it. And so the second month was like $200 and I was like, okay, what if I 10x this again? And so I just kept doing it. And then after like six months I crossed the thousand dollar mark and I was like telling my husband like this behind the scenes income stream paid our mortgage.
A lot of people are like, how is your mortgage under? $1,000. We buy and renovate houses also as a side hustle, but we don't buy anything under $200,000. We're just like, we're going to live in it and we're going to fix it. And we're going to do that type of self abuse. So anyway, so after like six to eight months, I was like, this is over a thousand dollars a month.
I'm not going to stop.
Melissa: That's awesome. Love it! So, we gotta break it down a little bit, cause, so these are books that you're selling, but they're not physical books, are they?
Jenny: Are they?
They are physical books. Okay. So, when you think about, your kids all have these really fun interests, right? Like, when you go to back to school shopping, your kids are, your son's like, yeah, I'm Do not get me a pink notebook and you're like, note taken your kids like the ocean.
They like astronauts and things like that. So when you go to back to school shopping, you have really limited choices when you're at Target or Walmart or things like that for those notebooks. There's actually a lot of demand. when parents go onto Amazon and look up shark. Notebook, composition notebook, and they're selling.
And so what we started doing is just making really fun notebook covers. And Amazon is a print on demand site. So they do all of the printing and shipping for you. They house your digital document. And these are all like physical books with prime shipping.
Melissa: Okay. So, but you're not having to have the books printed and then ship them out yourself.
Everything goes through Amazon. So you just were the creative behind making the cover and making or what the design and then they fulfill it.
Jenny: Yes. Print it and fulfill it. Yep. Okay. That's cool. My kids were kind of like, I want to try this and I was like, well, I took their artwork and I scanned it and I put it on a notebook and all the grandparents, cousins, they all bought it and it's like their grocery store book, right?
Like, let's write down stuff. And so it started initiating like a little bit of fire in my seven and eight year old. And so they did coloring books where I worked with them on Canva. You can use anything that's free on Canva to upload to Amazon KDP. So they did coloring books and like in a year they made $600 and bought their first like Nintendo Switch.
So that was like fun for them. I'm trying to tell them like, put your money back into your books, but they're like, no, thanks. So I'm like, you know, if they, if they get the fire of like, you guys probably experienced that with flips where you're like, hey, you're going to keep the profits or are we going to go look for some more treasure?
You know?
Melissa: Yeah. Yeah, our youngest is definitely the most like, he's like, okay, well, let's what else can we find? Let's flip and post and sell and make more money. So. That's pretty fun.
Rob: Yeah, it's definitely cool to see their, their growth and what we do. And I'm, you're experiencing the same way with your kids too. So that's really fun.
Melissa: So once you create a design, you post it on Amazon and like, you're like, and then you'd hope it sells. Do you have to kind of do some advertising for it or does Amazon take care of a lot of that for you?
Jenny: Yeah, so that's a great question. So Amazon will give you like the template that you need for the cover size.
So it keeps it pretty simple. All you need is a Canva pro account. I like to recommend pro because you're not limited by resizing things and that can just save you a lot of time. And so once you put it up there, you need to just use keywords where people can find it. So it's probably really similar with some eBay research that there are outside tools that can help you navigate those market gaps.
And that's really what I like teaching is like, everyone can put a notebook on Amazon, but what makes yours different? What customer are you speaking to? And so there is a little bit of that marketing that comes in. And I think that's kind of what accelerated my results. I, I have a background in digital marketing.
And so it was just a matter of teaching people like, let's not just slap a cover together. Let's actually find a customer that's looking for this. And through that, I think is why I was able to scale to six figures is because I found that market gap of like, okay, this works. And the cool thing is Amazon is a buying platform.
So there's 90 million monthly users there. That's different than when like you post a video. It's actually probably the most similar to eBay, right? Like, When people go on eBay, they're not going to see what grandma's doing. They're not going to post pictures of their kids. They have a buyer's mind. And Amazon is the same thing.
I would say the only thing that like Amazon has on eBay is that Jeff Bezos patented the one click button for purchases. Like, just the buyer intent is so powerful. And It's just, I just am blown away that there's even Amazon influencers. There's people that have like QVC shows. We probably kind of saw that when we were at Podfest when we met each other for the first time.
That like there are people that just like hang out on shopping places. Which sounds weird, but like what did we do when we were teenagers? We went to the mall because we're like, this is so cool. So like that buyer habit has never really like exhausted ourselves as humans. We still have problems that we need to be solved and a lot of people go get their problems solved with books first, right?
Like before I buy, before I pay a high ticket coach, like, well, let me just see what's out there online because I'm not ready to make that commitment. So being able to publish. different types of content on Amazon, you're going to find people that actually like buying things because they're willing to invest in a book.
Melissa: Yeah, that's that's cool. So is there because we were talking about this before we hopped on here, we've never sold on Amazon because there's so much red tape to selling. But when we're thinking of selling on Amazon, we're thinking of like products. Most people go and find products that are you know, they are clearance or smaller product and then sell them for a couple dollars more or whatever. Like that's most Amazon sellers where they find a niche that they get in or that's hot or whatever. But this is completely different.
Like is there a lot of like different products? Gated stuff, because I know when people first start on Amazon, there's, you know, gated, you have to do all this stuff before you can get through to selling this type of merchandise. But does that happen in this?
Jenny: Yeah, so the really neat thing about Amazon KDP, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, is that there is no fee to have an account.
And when you do FBA or you're an Amazon seller, you pay $39 a month, you have to trademark your brand. There are some entry, there are some barriers to entry. With Amazon KDP, it's free and it's free around the world. And so the downside of that is that there's tons of people that are like, let's just put a notebook in every color on Amazon without understanding a market gap.
Once you understand the market gap, you're like, oh my goodness, let's siphon leads from Amazon by putting our content on here, not only to establish authority, but to help customers find us better. And about six months ago I was typing in something on Google and my name came up number one in the search, but it was not my website, and it was not my YouTube channel that has 600 videos, it was my book on Amazon. Interesting. And so it really showed me like, oh, wow, like, of course, Jeff Bezos or Beth Jezos, for my own protection, of course, he's going to take his SEO game seriously, right? Like it's the biggest shopping platform in the world.
So that was like, you know, I need to be helping more people, coaches, and course creators and even people with side hustles think about how to leverage Amazon as an additional site, not only for income, but for traffic. And so I've been working on a new program where we're going to help like coaches put their frameworks into a workbook as lead gen, right, to their continuity programs or something like that.
But the really interesting thing is that I had a book, it was a prompted line journal and it's made me $40,000. And so it's kind of blown my mind that like there is a place for an Amazon buyer to buy something that solves their problem. And now I'm at the point where Amazon can't keep up with my demand because it's hard cover.
So now I'm like looking into manufacturers overseas to see if it makes sense to spend that five or six grand up front and ship my books to Amazon. But I never would have been able to do that if I didn't have a book income stream machine behind the scenes growing. That for me, so it really is kind of an untapped opportunity for people that wanna establish authority without writing a book.
Like let's just get a workbook out, think about all the PDFs that people have, and like how do we repurpose this to put on a platform where there's buyers? 'cause a lot of us have to run ads to find stuff. So to answer the second part of your question, I did have a background in Facebook ads, so I decided to learn Amazon ads.
And that's really where my sales started accelerating and the really crazy thing about Amazon ads is that you don't pay for click, you pay, or sorry, you don't pay for impression. So if someone side eyes your book, you're not penalized. You only pay for what someone clicks on. And in addition to that, Amazon will tell you what the customer's typing in.
So what I would do is run ads and get all that data and make more books because I didn't have to do any fulfillment. And so that's how, the only reason I'm able to have 498 books is because I'm mining the data and ads to be like, oh, this is in demand and no one's made this type of journal in this type of color.
I'm doing it. I turn it on, turn on ads and it makes money. So it really is so cool.
Melissa: That's, so I was going to ask you how many books you had. So you have almost 500 books right now.
Jenny: 498. I'm like, what is the next two books? But I, I got a little book fatigue because I have a coaching program that I teach people how to do this.
So it's kind of like, I want to be more intentional. And I, you know, I asked my kids, like, you guys want to do the next two books to have 500 and they're not into it yet. So it's kind of like, what is that next thing? But, you know, that's just two years of work and not all the book sellers, a lot of testing just to like figure out what goes into making a profitable, profitable book.
Melissa: So, how long does it take to go from, like, thought, like, oh, this could be a good idea, to creating the book, to getting it on Amazon, like, how long is, now you're probably really efficient with it. So, like, how long would it take you, and then maybe how long does it take somebody starting out?
Jenny: Yeah. So, now it's, like, 30 minutes, and it's, it's actually, it's actually kind of crazy when you have an avenue, like, you guys know this, because you're actually able to stop by the side of the road.
Because you know exactly how long it's going to take you to upload a product, a listing on eBay. And so once you do it a couple of times, that learning curve is kind of gone and then you're in a different mindset. But when you first start, you know, I actually give people a notebook and an interior to just upload because it seems like if you can upload your first book, your confidence just kind of takes off because no one really thinks about, you know, there's, I think the statistic is about 87 percent of the United States want to write a book.
Only about 3 percent of that 80%, 87 percent do it. And when you think about like, oh, I want to publish a book. No one even thinks about like, how do I actually get it on Amazon? You know, so that technical side, you can do it in 15 minutes if you have all the content. But last night I got on the zoom call, I was laying in bed and my sister texts me like Lexi's 13.
She needs to get the self care journal out for teenagers. Can you get on? And I, I got on laying in bed on zoom and we did it in 20 minutes, but she had worked on this stuff in Canva. So really, I would say like, if you have any design sense, you could probably do it in the same day. Amazon will take three days to like review it, but you really can go really fast.
And then other people, like they want to write a book. I have a student, she just did like a, she married an Indian guy 30 years ago and they have this fusion of like recipes. They actually live in Florida. So she just did like a family cookbook. And I was like, that's so inspiring. I want to do a cookbook next.
So it really kind of depends on the type of book that you want to publish and you know, what kind of goes into the result that you're creating for people. Yeah.
Rob: And Amazon has all these templates for different types of books, whatever you're doing that you just upload the content.
Jenny: So Amazon will give you the templates for the size that you need.
Okay. Yeah. So if you're like, this is the book I want to make, it's just KDP.Amazon.com and there's a whole help center. And I kind of joke, like I'm a help button in live action. Like I love Amazon's help button, but like how many of them have actually published 490 books, 98 books. So I'm like, I need to go to 1,000 just to be like, yeah, no one can stop me. But there is a lot of confidence in that. So, I have, we can actually put it, I can actually give you guys a template to put in the show notes of this where people can do like a line journal just to get started. Awesome. Oh, that's awesome.
Melissa: So what is something like a realistic, I know you've been doing this for a little, when did you start?
How long ago have you been doing this?
Jenny: January 1st, 2022. But my book didn't go live for three days because I didn't know what I was doing. So it's two years, two months.
Melissa: Okay. And you've already have 500 books. That's crazy. 498, sorry. Almost 500. What is a realistic, like, are you comfortable sharing like kind of what the books make you per month, like monomonthly?
And then like, what is realistic for somebody like getting started? What can they kind of think, okay, I can get this going. And I know it takes time to build, like, you know, you have that initial process, but then it's just kind of passive in the background once you get it going.
Jenny: Right. Yeah, what I have to just have to share this disclaimer is when I was also not wanting to get on zoom calls or answer emails, my parents were going through a divorce and they were married for 40 years.
So this was like so traumatic for me. And it's silly to say like an adult child of divorce, but that's exactly who I am. And so I was a little bit of like, not a depression, but like I was in an accelerated like what am I doing with my life? And so I don't think my results are normal because I did this full time. Like I was like kids are at school- publishing books, kids are like taking a nap- publishing books, like kids are asleep, but like where's my husband?
Oh, you know, like he's checking on me. Are you okay? I'm just at my computer for like hours straight and then after in July I was like I'm paying for a summer trip. Like by July, I hit three, three grand for the month. And usually it's recurring depending on where you publish. And so, last January I crossed $11,000 for selling a prompted journal.
And that's when I was like, I need to teach people this. So really your success, I tell people I didn't make money. I did. This didn't happen overnight, but I made a little bit of money every night. And that's kind of how I explain it that like, if you, especially if you're a business owner, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't learn the skillset to self publish so you can establish authority and start siphoning leads from Amazon.
But in addition to that, it really depends on what you put into it. And so like my kids, I help them, they made $600. That's all that they've made. But that's still like money they didn't have before. They didn't have a Nintendo Switch before. So it really kind of depends on the market niche that you find and then being consistent with it.
Right. That's like the. key to everything in life is like, you know, your shirt says a year from now, like if you start today, that's really kind of it. And so the really cool thing about this is like, it doesn't cost to start. So what is the actual risk of like putting in time now to get results later?
Melissa: And that's my next question was how much does it cost to start, but it really is almost.
really low?
Jenny: If you don't have a free, if you don't have a paid Canva Pro account, you can literally open Cacanva.comnd do it for free. It will take you a little bit extra time, but like you literally could start just making your own notebooks for your business now or for your kids or so. That's the really cool thing about it.
And I think it's really changed the world because, you know, many years ago, I'm sure that 87 percent of people that wanted to publish, they had to ask a traditional publisher how to do it. Stephen King, you know, like he threw away his manuscript in the garbage, his wife got it out. C. S. Lewis was rejected.
Dr. Seuss was rejected. So like all these stories, my goal is like to help I used to say I want to help 1,000 people publish, but now it's like 1,000 families because my kids will never grow up with the idea of like, I want to publish a book and I'm going to be that 3 percent that like, they'll just do it because they have the skill set in our home.
It's the same thing with you guys. Like I was thinking as you were talking, like how many times would your kids be like, we should sell this in our house because it's very valuable, you know, like it's just opening the mind to the possibility that you have this skill set that can change your life.
Because now, now that I have this, I don't ever worry about my future ever. I love course creation. I love coaching. That's my bread and butter. But like learning skill sets really can transform your life and your family's life. You guys know that too. It's just like understanding the value of eBay and being able to serve a customer that can't do it himself.
By the way, I have to tell you guys, my husband started selling chicken eggs on eBay and he's got five orders and I was like, I need to tell Rob and Melissa this.
Melissa: Love it. That's awesome. Chicken eggs that's a new one. I can't say we've heard that before.
Jenny: And that topic is in demand on Amazon. So my whole YouTube channel is like, Jack, you need to get, you need to write the backyard chicken book.
And I'm like, dear, you need to do this because it's in demand. But he's like, nobody will read it because I'm too technical. I'm like, people love dorks like you. Please publish the book.
Melissa: It's gotta publish. No, I was telling, we were talking about it before we hopped on, like, kind of what you do. Like, he didn't really, Robbie didn't understand exactly, like, how does this whole thing work?
And then after I was telling him, he's like, why don't we have stuff on Amazon? Like, we should have our content on Amazon.
Rob: Well, I think it's a misconception. Like, I hear Amazon, and a lot of people are like, the only thing I know about Amazon is you're gonna chalk out five to six thousand dollars to get on Amazon.
This is a whole other ballgame. That seems like it is very affordable for anybody to jump on and start to learn. It sounds like you've been in it so long, you know, the ins and the outs of how to use the, not just the algorithms, but also the, like the data that you're getting for the search. And like that blows my mind.
I have no idea how to do that or what to do, but it sounds like you've been in it so long that you just keep tweaking and getting better and better at what you're doing, which is really, really cool.
Jenny: Yeah, it is very, very accessible. And so there. It's really just a matter of time before I'm like, let me just do it for you, Rob and Melissa.
Like, let me just show you because it, the, the tricky part now is like, there's so much opportunity in the world. How do we know if it's a good fit for us? Right? Like, I tell my husband, like, go do the AB, like, he's on Facebook marketplace. Sometimes it drives me crazy, but I'm like, that's works for him. Like, Just like I'm on YouTube, you know, like, so I think it's a matter.
So I would say like, if you are a coach or you have a business or you have a passion to share a message, like KDP is perfect for you. If you've ever bought a planner that you're like, this stinks, I would change something in it. KDP is perfect because you can change those things all the time. So it's just really untapped.
And I think the reason why it's untapped is because with my marketing background, I'm bringing this new kind of niche, new opportunity where I want coaches and course creators to think about, well, how do I establish authority while getting leads from a buyer's platform? Which we talk about all the time.
We just don't talk about Amazon. In fact, Traffic Secrets by one of our favorite people, Russell Branson, I'm like, there's no chapter about Amazon in here. So I might have to write it. Yeah. I'm going to have to be like, here, let's do this.
Melissa: So there's really two types of people this is for like people who already you know already doing the coaching and already this is just Another place for traffic, but it's also for the person who just wants an extra income stream that's low barrier to entry. You know it, of course, there's some time to learn it, but as far as money wise it's pretty low cost to get started which is really cool, so yeah.
Rob: And you get better and better at it make more money.
Melissa: And I have to add you did this because you didn't want to do it Zoom and coaching, but now you're back to helping people and back to coaching.
And we're actually doing a live training with you. So this week on Thursday, grab the link and actually what is the link going to be? It's going to be fleamarketflipper.com/Jenny We'll put the link in the show notes. And J E N N Y two ends. Correct. Right. Okay. So definitely check that out.
She's going to go into a lot more depth of all this thing. And if you think this could be a good fit for you, definitely come check it out. It's going to be a fun time. We love hanging out with Jenny. So anything else you want to add to this?
Jenny: Yeah. I mean, I think learning skill sets can cure a lot of problems in our life.
I told you, like, I was just uploading books. I was kind of depressed. My parents were going through divorce. Two years later, I'm like, that's so crazy to me that I didn't want to get on zoom calls or answer emails because that's what I actually love doing. And so I'm really excited just to help you guys see in this training, we're going to talk about like, what's actually profitable on Amazon. So you want to come and it's going to be live. So we're going to answer questions. We're going to talk about the lowest hanging fruit, probably what Rob and Melissa talk about with eBay, you know, like what are the quick wins and then how to become a bestseller because people always wonder that and it's literally like three steps.
So we're going to be talking about this in our training. It's a free training and you don't have to do it alone. If you want to learn, we want you guys to come.
Melissa: Awesome. I'm excited about it. I'm going to go. We're going to publish a book. So we're going to do it. I'm excited. So thanks
so much, Jenny.
Rob: Jenny, you're awesome.
Thank you so much for spending some time with us today and talking about your business. Greatly appreciate you and your time and we cannot wait to see you on Thursday and everybody else who is going to jump in live and learn more about this self publishing. We're excited.
Jenny: Thank you guys.