Jay’s book is now generating over $4,000 a month in Kindle sales through the Amazon.com. Listen as Jay shares his story of deciding to write a book, getting it self-published, and what he thinks is the reason behind his success through Amazon.
When people found out Jay Herring used to work on a cruise ship, they would pepper him with questions like, “What was it like?” or “Could you get off anywhere you wanted to?”
After Jay resigned from working for Carnival Cruise Lines in IT, he found a job in sales working 4 hours a day making $10 an hour for 20 hours a week. His wife was not a US citizen, though, and therefore unable to get a job. Their family finances were very, very tight. They were in the red every month with only a little bit in savings to hold them over.
Jay had an entrepreneurial spirit, so he searched for job ideas that would earn him more money than minimum wage. He realized that with a book, once you write it, it has the potential to earn money forever. So he set out to pen his experience as an officer on a cruise ship. The Truth About Cruise Ships would be a book about all the things that happen below deck that the passengers would never know about or otherwise see.
After weighing the options between self-publishing and traditional publishing. After reading The Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Pointer, Jay opted for self-publishing. He discovered that meant he would be the one responsible for hiring the editors and printer, and he would be responsible for all marketing on the book. But most importantly, Jay learned a big publisher would pay him a royalty of 10% or 15% of what they would make on the book. Since he didn’t want to give away 90% of the profits, self-publishing seemed like his best option.
Setting up a book for Kindle sales, Jay said, is surprisingly easy. Amazon has helpful articles for getting started. They will review it to ensure it’s not plagiarized, and as long as it’s the author’s own content, it will be approved. If a writer has problems, their customer service will respond within 24 hours. Amazon also offers sales tracking through their site, as well as giving the author the ability to make cover or book description adjustments.
It was a year and a half, though, before Jay saw his book sales take off on Amazon—or any site for that matter. Jay said that while he’s not sure exactly why, he thinks 4 things contributed to his recent success:
1.Niche audience: 14 million people in North America cruise every year, a million people every month. Jay’s book caters to a large niche.
2.Title: He split tested his title with a different tile using Google AdWords. The current title, The Truth About Cruise Ships, outperformed the other title 3:1.
3.Teaser: He includes a teaser in his book description on Amazon. He includes 2-3 pages of Chapter 1 and leaves the readers hanging, waiting for more.
4.Content: Jay says he wrote the best book he could possibly write. He didn’t cut corners. It took him almost 4 years from start to finish
Tell me about the Amazon Kindle sales revenue you have.
What type of format do you need to have the book in?
How do you get your book into Amazon and on the Kindle?
Is Amazon the one place to sell?
Welcome to the Part-Time Money Podcast, Episode 15: Making Extra Money by Self-Publishing Books for the Amazon Kindle. I am your host Philip Taylor, creator of PT Money Personal Finance.
Philip Taylor: Alright, today I am here with my friend, Jay Herring. Jay is the author of the book The Truth About Cruise Ships, so if you have ever wanted to know what goes on behind the scenes on a cruise ship with the employees there, check out his memoir of sorts. He used to work on a cruise ship, has some experience doing that, and wrote a book. That is not where the story ends. He decided to, like I say, put his story to paper and then also transfer it over to a digital product that he has on Amazon he is selling through the Kindle, and he is now making about $4000 a month in sales. So, I am anxious to hear how Jay is doing. He is actually a friend of mine from back in my former corporate career, and so I am anxious to see how things have progressed for him in this area of his life.
Jay Herring: Yeah, I am still in the corporate career. Let us make that clear. I have not been able to break free yet.
Philip Taylor: Well hey, $4000 a month is a good start.
Jay Herring: I might be on my way. We will see.
Philip Taylor: Well, Jay, welcome to the podcast.
Jay Herring: Thanks, Phil. Glad to be here.
Philip Taylor: Yep. So, backing up a little bit, I sort of said a lot there about your history and what you are doing now, but backing up a little bit, what made you want to start making some part-time money? I guess really the question is what made you want to write a book?
Jay Herring: Yeah, I guess I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit, always looking for ways to make some money and never really found a way to do any of that very well. After I worked on the ship, what I found was that even when I worked on a ship, the passengers, anytime I came home on vacation, and even the year since I left, whenever people find out I worked on a cruise ship, they ask a ton of questions: What was it like? Could you get off in port? And all of these things. So I thought, “Man! This sounds like something that maybe a lot of folks are interested in, and maybe this would be a topic that would work for a book.”
Philip Taylor: What year was that? What year did you decide to actually write the book?
Jay Herring: I decided in 2005. It took me about 4 years to finish.
Philip Taylor: Okay. Okay.
Jay Herring: It was quite a dedication.
Philip Taylor: Okay. What took so long?
Jay Herring: You know, partly it was just my own motivation. I had never written a book before. If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I thought I would ever write a book, I would say there was no way I would do that. I do not consider myself an author. What I did was I grabbed a bunch of books on how to write, how to be an author, and how to write the best that you can. I really invested the time. You will see some of the information products out there now, and some of the advice you will hear for future authors is they say, “Oh, you could write a book in 30 days! Follow our system.” Maybe you can. Maybe you can put words on paper, but it is not going to be anything of value I do not think, at least not in full format, the full book format. You know, if you are doing a small eBook or something like that, yeah, that is completely doable. There are 300 pages in the paperback form of my book. So, to put something together like that that is of length, you just cannot do it in 30 days. What I found was it just took a lot of tracking on my part. I started tracking the amount of time that I spent writing, and I would find that some months I would only spend 4 or 5 hours total that month writing. I decided, “Alright, if this is ever going to get done, I have to commit to the goal of 2 hours a day that I spend on putting this together.” Once I did that, it started coming together a little better.
Philip Taylor: Okay. I love where this is going. Thanks for giving the insight into your process. I want to dig a little deeper in there. First, I want to still back up a bit and talk about where you were financially back in 2005 and was the book just sort of an outpouring of, “Hey, I just have to get this story out,” or was it literally, “I am doing this to pursue an entrepreneurial thing here. I am going to make some money off this book.”?
Jay Herring: Yeah, I would say more than anything in the beginning that is why I started – I hoped to make some money. To take you back to 2005, I left Carnival, and I was in IT. That is what I did onboard; I was the IT manager. I was an officer. I got to wear the officer uniform.
Philip Taylor: Nice!
Jay Herring: The guy dressed in white – that was me on the ship. When I got back I decided I did not want to do IT anymore, and I decided I wanted to get into sales. Well, sales is kind of a tough thing to break into. Mirka and I (That is my wife. I met her onboard the ship.) got married, and we moved over here. She was not able to work because she was not a U.S. citizen. The only job I could find in sales was working 4 hours a day making $10 an hour, and that was it. It was 20 hours a week, so finances were very, very tight. We were in the red every month. We had a little bit in savings to hold us over. From there I got promoted to a full-time position and took another job from a company after that. So, the corporate salary grew over the years, but when I first started writing this book, we were just barely eeking by.
Philip Taylor: I see. I see. And, were you looking for other ways to make money as well on a part-time basis, or were you putting all your energy into this?
Jay Herring: I had a few other ideas out there that I thought might do something. I cannot remember any of them now. I had a list of things. It was nothing like part-time delivering pizza or any of these hourly wage jobs. I was really looking for something that could scale beyond just trading my time for money.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: Okay? And so what is great about a book is you write it once, and you sell it forever.
Philip Taylor: Right. Yep.
Jay Herring: Right? So that is one of the things that really kind of drew me to that. Once I got into it, I kind of fell in love with the process of it to some extent. It was sort of a double-edged sword – I really enjoyed the process, but at the same time it was such an enormous commitment of time. You think about you want to go get a bachelor’s degree, that is a huge investment of time. That is sort of what it was like, for me at least, writing this book because I had never written a book before, nor had I ever done any writing really of any sort. So, it was a lot of work for me to do, maybe less for some folks, but for me it was a lot of work.
Philip Taylor: Alright. So, just to give folks a little background, the book is, like I said, somewhat of a memoir of your experiences on the boat?
Jay Herring: Yeah, it is basically about all the things that happen below deck on a cruise ship. It is not a book about the passenger experience. Right? I mean you can just take a cruise to know what it is like to be a passenger.
Philip Taylor: Right.
Jay Herring: This is a book about all the things that happen below deck that the passengers would never know about or otherwise see.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: That is sort of the premise of the book.
Philip Taylor: Awesome, awesome!
Jay Herring: Yeah.
Philip Taylor: It sounds like you were the expert. Not many people can really write this book, so it is somewhat niche.
Jay Herring: Yeah, and it is funny because I ended up self-publishing.
Philip Taylor: Okay.
Jay Herring: When I first decided I was going to write this book, I looked into what does self-publishing even mean versus the traditional method? Basically all it means is that as a self-publisher, you are the one responsible for hiring the editors and doing the print, hiring somebody to print and bind the books. You are responsible for all the marketing.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: It is basically just a small business. That is essentially what it is. You do all the marketing yourself. You are not getting any help from what a major publisher would do normally.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: It is funny because if you want to go with a major publishing house, one of the first things they tell you to do is write a query letter. Basically you have to sell your book idea to this publisher.
Philip Taylor: I see. I see.
Jay Herring: Okay, you have to convince them that this is a book that they should buy and that they will make money on.
Philip Taylor: Right.
Jay Herring: So I did some research on the cruise market and how big this market is. Well, every month 1,000,000 people take a cruise. So, I put this query letter together. It is a 1-page thing, and I am talking about trying to sell this to whoever I am trying to sell this to, the publisher. I read the letter when I am done, and I think, “This will absolutely sell. This is such a great idea. There is no reason why this will not sell.” So, that was one of the things that led me to just self-publish.
Philip Taylor: I see. So, you just had super confidence that if you invested the money and the time personally, you would get all that back for yourself?
Jay Herring: Yeah, absolutely. If you go with a major publisher, they have a marketing engine if they choose to use it on you that could really launch you into the big time, but for the most part, even if you go with a big publisher, you are still as the author the one really responsible for promoting your book. They just sort of take care of the backend business stuff. One book I got is a book by a guy by the name of Dan Pointer. The book is called The Self-Publishing Manual.
Philip Taylor: Okay.
Jay Herring: He just lays out how to publish a book yourself. When I read it, one of the things he said in there is that if you self-publish, you will typically make more money than if you go with a big publishing house.
Philip Taylor: Right.
Jay Herring: Because a big publisher will pay you a royalty of 10% or 15% of what they make on the book. You are just giving away 90% of the profits, so that is one of the things that led me to self-publish.
Philip Taylor: Yeah, and it seems like across all types of publishing, there is sort of a shift to the independent guy having
more of an ability to make more of a headway and do a lot of the things himself.
Jay Herring: Yeah, for sure, and it is even easier now than it was 5 years ago.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: With the Kindle out, there are just a slew of printing houses. Any service you need is really easy to find on the internet, so it is easier than ever to do that.
Philip Taylor: Okay, so let us talk about 2009 which is, I think, when you first finished The Truth About Cruise Ships. Am I right?
Jay Herring: Yeah, that is right. That came out in February 2009 on the Kindle, and then a couple months later the paperback was ready.
Philip Taylor: Okay, so you released on the Kindle pretty early then?
Jay Herring: Yeah, because I had all the text ready, and once that was all ready, proofed, and good to go, I could put it out on the Kindle while I was waiting for the paperback to be printed, bound, shipped to me, and all that.
Philip Taylor: Okay. So, quick question, who did you outsource the binding and all to?
Jay Herring: It was a company up in Seattle. They are called Gorham Printing.
Philip Taylor: Okay.
Jay Herring: Gorham Printing, yeah.
Philip Taylor: Alright.
Jay Herring: And I just found them online. I just did a search and found them. They sounded like a good company, so I went with them.
Philip Taylor: Alright. Very cool. Editing? Who did you get to edit?
Jay Herring: I had 2 editors. One was a girl by the name of Dorrie O’Brien. Another guy asked me to keep his name off of that for some reason I do not know. I think he wanted to go off and write his own books and did not want to be associated with an editor or something.
Philip Taylor: I see.
Jay Herring: I ended up having 2 editors.
Philip Taylor: So you just found these people?
Jay Herring: Yeah, what did I do? There was a website called Book-Editing.com. If you just Google search book editing, it was like #1 or 2.
Philip Taylor: Alright.
Jay Herring: They are sort of a consortium of editors. The way it works is you submit your manuscript to them, you get a bunch of bids back on people who say they will work for you, and then you pick the one you want.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm. Alright. Well, I definitely want to talk to you about the Kindle part because that seems to be the part of your business that has really taken off. People with the Kindle and other eReaders are really…
Jay Herring: Yeah, it is interesting – probably 95% of my revenue, that $4000 a month, is all Kindle, and then paperback and the iBookstore on Apple and the Barnes and Noble Nook, that might make up another $200 to $300 in profit total.
Philip Taylor: So, what type of format do you have to have your book in, and how do you get it onto Amazon to be accepted into the Kindle?
Jay Herring: It is actually surprisingly easy. Amazon is such a great model for publishing your book because if you just get on Amazon and just go search, they have all kinds of articles and help on how to get started. Basically you just create an account with them, and then you just post your book up there. They sort of review it and make sure it is not something inappropriate or something licensed to somebody else or something like that. As long as it is your own material and it is not something inappropriate, then it will go on there. They have all the instructions on how to do it. It is really not that hard. If you can set up an iTunes account and buy songs online at Apple, then you can do this on the Kindle, you can set your book up on Kindle. They have a great help forum, so you can e-mail them questions, and they get back to you within 24 hours. It is a really, really great system. You can track your sales online through their web interface and make adjustments with your cover or the text that is in your book’s description. It is a fantastic system. It is really, really easy to do it on the Kindle.
Philip Taylor: I see, and Amazon pretty much owns online publishing. They are the marketplace, right, for books?
Jay Herring: You know, I think so. I think they have the lion’s share. When someone wants to read a book, I think the place they go to first if they are going on the internet is Amazon, right? I mean iBookstore exists, and people who have iPads, maybe they may go to that, but I think in general Amazon is king. At least that has been my experience with my book. I have my book on Barnes and Noble on their eReader, and I sell like 10 copies a month.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: On Amazon I am selling – I think last month I did 670 copies.
Philip Taylor: Okay. Wow! That is great! Congratulations!
Jay Herring: Yeah, yeah, thank you. What is interesting is to date I have sold a little over 3000 books, and half of all that happened within the first 3 months of this year, 2011.
Philip Taylor: I see. So, let us talk about that a little bit. We have already established the motivation for writing the book, how you had the experience, how you got it sort of going in terms of writing, editing, and getting it published in paperback format. It sounds like getting it onto Amazon was fairly easy. It sounds like it has been almost a year and a half on the Kindle on Amazon without …
Jay Herring: … before it did anything.
Philip Taylor: Yeah. So, talk to me about the difference between that time period and what is going on now.
Jay Herring: You know, it is interesting. I almost do not know why it did so well. I wish I did. It is sort of hard to track on Amazon where your clicks are coming from or how many people are viewing the book description. There is no way to get that from Amazon. I think that if I had to give 4 reasons why my book is doing well, 1 would be the audience. Again, it is a huge audience; 14,000,000 people in North America cruise every year, a million people a month. That would be #1. Number 2 would be my title. I actually ended up split testing my title with a different title, I do not know if you are familiar but split testing using Google AdWords.
Philip Taylor: Okay.
Jay Herring: So my original title of the book was going to be Behind the Crew Only Doors, and then I read somewhere in some marketing online free eBook or something that said The Truth About… is a really catchy title that seems to draw people.
Philip Taylor: Yeah. I like that.
Jay Herring: I thought, “Alright, so let’s split test it.” I put the 2 on Google AdWords, and The Truth About Cruise Ships outperformed the other one like 3:1.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: So, it was clear that that was a much better title, so that is what I went with. The third thing that I think I would attribute it to is the teaser that I have in the book description on Amazon. If you go to Amazon and you search for my book, The Truth About Cruise Ships, I post Chapter 1 on there. It is 2-3 pages total. It is sort of like a teaser. It is like that cliffhanger when you watch soaps during the day, and they always leave you hanging, waiting for more. That is sort of what I have in that first chapter. So, if someone reads that, they want to see what happens next.
Philip Taylor: I see.
Jay Herring: So, that would be the third thing. The fourth thing is that I wrote the best book that I knew how to write. I did not cut any corners. I did not just try to slop it together.
Philip Taylor: Okay.
Jay Herring: Those would be the 4 things I would say. What ended up happening, why sales really took off, is if you go to Amazon and do a search for “cruise” or “cruise ships,” I come up #1.
Philip Taylor: Awesome!
Jay Herring: That took, like I said, about 8 months before that happened.
Philip Taylor: I see.
Jay Herring: Once it did, sales just took off.
Philip Taylor: Do you think that had to do with people leaving reviews?
Jay Herring: They did leave some reviews. Again, I think it was just the audience was there, and the book was of sufficient quality that people enjoyed it.
Philip Taylor: I see.
Jay Herring: So, I could have all of those pieces in place, but if the book is just absolute crap, then people are going to talk about it, and it is not going to do well. If you look online, there are other books there. There is one other author that wrote a book called Cruise Confidential. He does really well. There are a couple others that do not do so well, and they are also written by crew members.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: I think that the difference might be that they just did not have the substance in the book.
Philip Taylor: They did not spend 4 years writing it, you know?
Jay Herring: Maybe they did not, yeah.
Philip Taylor: That is great, Man! So, do you have any sense of where you are in terms of scaling this thing up?
Jay Herring: You know, I do not. I need to put more thought into that. One idea I had is I have a companion free eBook where I give cruise tips.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: And, I have noticed on Amazon in the last couple of months that there are a number of folks who are posting books about how to take a cruise, and they seem to be doing okay, so I think I may try to leverage the success of my full-length book and maybe throw my cruise tips eBook on there for $1. That might be 1 way to scale it. I would love to get on The Today Show, for example. Maybe I can get some publicity in some of the online things like msnbc.com in their travel section or something like that.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm.
Jay Herring: We will see where it goes.
Philip Taylor: Yeah. I could see it happening for you, Man. This is good. This is good stuff. So, how have you marketed the book outside of the Amazon Marketplace?
Jay Herring: I went to a publicity summit. This is a conference put on by a guy who sort of tailors to authors. It is all about how to get free publicity, how to get radio interviews, how to get on TV. I went to this conference, and out of that I did about 10-15 radio interviews. I did not notice a huge difference in sales based off of those. That might be different if I get some TV coverage (I think it is maybe a little bit bigger audience) or if I was on maybe some larger stations at primetime hours. A lot of the shows I did were at like 5 in the morning, and who is listening to the radio at 5 in the morning, right? Not as many people.
Philip Taylor: Right.
Jay Herring: So, I did that. That is one thing I did. The other thing I have is I have a YouTube video. If you go to YouTube and do a search for cruise ship in hurricane, I come up #1 there. One of the stories I talk about in my book is when we sailed in a hurricane. I took some video of some of the damage that the ship took, the flooding in my cabin, and some of the waves outside, and I threw that up there. I do not know, but I had maybe 85,000 hits on that. From the video (I mention that the book is for sale), I think I get some hits. That is a pretty good way to market, and it is free, right? YouTube is free.
Philip Taylor: Yep.
Jay Herring: So, I was lucky to have some footage for that.
Philip Taylor: Genius using what you had there!
Jay Herring: Yeah, and that is really about it. I was giving away the free cruise tips eBook. I was giving it away for free as a way to market it. Within that I have links and talk about the regular book that is for sale. That is about it.
Philip Taylor: Okay. So, any last minute tips for folks who might have an idea and want to put it to paper or a digital product and get it into the Amazon Marketplace to sell it? Any tips for those folks?
Jay Herring: Yeah, you know I would say if you have a topic in mind, try to think about maybe (instead of a full-length book because it is an enormous commitment, and unless you have the audience for it, it may be a lot of time you spend for very little return) dipping your toe in the water by doing some of the shorter books for 99 cents and see what kind of response you get. Like I said, those cruise tip books that are out there, some of those folks (based on the sales numbers as compared to mine) I am guessing are probably doing $400 or $500 a month. This is for a book that they could write in a weekend.
Philip Taylor: I see.
Jay Herring: Because it is not even a book. It is like an article. It is a short little nothing. It is almost like information product that you think about in the traditional sense, but the Amazon Kindle is a whole new way to market that, those digital eBooks, that folks ought to look into.
Philip Taylor: Hmm. So, you are saying really just anyone with information, even if it is just at a smaller level … for instance, my “52 Ways to Make Money” – I could turn that into some type of eReader?
Jay Herring: Yeah, and it is actually really easy. You could drop that into a Kindle, sell it for 99 cents, and what you have been giving away for free, see how it does on the Kindle. It is available for free – you can download it from your website, but maybe folks like the convenience of having it on their Kindle – they are on an airplane, or they are doing whatever, and they just like the convenience of the Kindle. What is interesting is when I talk about Kindle sales (last month I did 670 books I sold on the Kindle, and I sold about 50 of the paperback on Amazon – the same website), I think one of the big differences is the paperback is $16.95, and the Kindle is $9.95. There must be something magic about that $10 threshold where people think. “Oh, how bad could it be? It is only $10.” I think about playing Angry Birds on my iPad, and I want to upgrade to the eagle, the mighty eagle – oh, it is only 99 cents, who cares? Or buying Angry Birds to begin with – oh, it is only $4.99 or whatever it was. It is just such a low price point that the risk is just not there, so people maybe are more inclined to buy.
Philip Taylor: Mm hmm. This is great, Man! So, financially, where does this leave you? If you continue at the $4000 a month level, obviously that is some good income on top of your corporate gig. But, maybe you could grow this thing into something that could have you doing this full time. Is that in the future?
Jay Herring: Yeah, I could see that. Again, 1,000,000 people cruise a month, and I have only tapped into 600-700 in a month. There are just so many people out there that I think would enjoy this book that either do not know about it or just for whatever reason have not found it. Yeah, this could really take off. I am not quite sure how to get there yet.
Philip Taylor: Well, I hope you figure it out, Man!
Jay Herring: Yeah, I will just keep plugging away.
Philip Taylor: Yep. This has been an interesting interview. Where can people find out more about you and your book?
Jay Herring: Like I say, if they just go to Amazon, do a search for “cruise” or “cruise tips,” the title of the book is The Truth About Cruise Ships. They can search for that. They can find it that way. They can go to my website which is TheTruthAboutCruiseShips.com. That was another thing I had – I had ABC’s Nightline call me after they saw my YouTube video and asked if they could use my footage on a clip they were doing about cruise ships.
Philip Taylor: Very cool.
Jay Herring: I was like, “Of course! Yes please!”
Philip Taylor: “If you mention my book!”
Jay Herring: I asked them if they would, and they would not. What is funny is I am outside filming the waves. The salt water is splashing up all over me. I took the camera, and I kind of turned it to look at the lens, so my nostrils were seen by 3,900,000 people on national television – not me, not my book, just my nostrils.
Philip Taylor: Awesome!
Jay Herring: Yeah, good times!
Philip Taylor: Well, good deal, Jay. I appreciate you being on, Man!
Jay Herring: Alright, thanks for having me, Phil.
Philip Taylor: Alright, sounds good.
Jay Herring: We will see you.
That does it for this week’s episode. Thanks so much for listening. You can find more episodes at ptmoney.com or on iTunes under the Part-Time Money Podcast. See you guys next week.
In today’s episode, I talk with friend and author, Jay Herring. Jay is the author of the The Truth About Cruise Ships
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