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Welcome to the launch of the Sustainable Side Hustle Podcast with Vinayak Ramesh.

Today’s episode features Krista Brea, who built a six-figure Amazon KDP publishing business while still working her day job.

We talk about how she got started with KDP, what helped her turn one book into a repeatable business, and what she would do if she had to start all over again from scratch.

>>> Don't forget to follow the show, download these powerful launch episodes, and drop us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

>>> Claim your FREE gift for supporting the launch — the Substack Notes Starter Pack + Substack Growth Engine. Leave a review and DM me on Substack: https://substack.com/@vinayakramesh1

Hey, this is your host, Vinayak and welcome to the Sustainable side Hustle podcast.

Today I've got Krista with me who has built a six figure Amazon publishing business, grown her YouTube channel to 17,000 subscribers, and built her own community on school that is closing in on 2,000 members.

And she's doing all of this while still working her day job.

So let's get right into the details.

If you lost everything tomorrow but you still had your day job, what would your first 30 day look like?

Trying to build it all back up.

So I think if I lost everything and I had to restart, I would actually start with more of an authority based book to set myself up as somebody who knew what they were doing to build this business, I needed to lean more into my credibility because in my career for over 12 years I've been doing SEO and that's really the foundation of my success.

So I would go in starting with a book or around that so that way I can highlight myself as a professional in the field and then start my publishing for passive income over again alongside my school community where I can have those credentials to actually sell that book.

I have a career that I'm still working in where I'm an SEO expert and I've been in my career for many years.

But after having a child, I realized how expensive children can be and I think a lot of us are out there looking for another way to make income online.

So I heard about making money with Amazon right now.

What appealed to me about KDP is the fact that you don't have to show your face, right?

It's kind of like a faceless product to say you don't have to expose who you are, you can write in pen names.

There's a lot of cool things that you can do behind the scenes.

So it felt comfortable to try it out without having to attach any anything to it and see how well it works.

When I created my first book, it was just a fun project.

It wasn't really meant to take off.

Honestly, the way I looked at the first book was something to learn how to do all the different steps and mess up along the way so that way I could learn from that and have better launches later.

So that first book that I did, I think I was able to completely execute on it less than two weeks because I treated was interesting.

I picked a, a topic that was just fun that I would enjoy to create on and then I treated it like a blog.

I'm like, think about it, if you could write a blog and a lot of blogs today are like 600 to a thousand words.

And you just have to do that like 30 times.

And you have a pretty thick book.

Some people just jump in with this idea of, oh, yeah, I'm just going to write this book, but then it's completely disconne and it doesn't speak to the readers.

And then it was a flop.

And so I think what's really important going into publishing is a lot of that upfront research.

People say don't judge a book by its cover, but when you're selling books out here online, you have to judge your book by its cover, because that is what people are choosing on Amazon.

And remember, you have to set your book up to compete because when you're on Amazon, you only have very small real estate and your book gets squished down to the size of a thumbnail.

And if that thumbnail is not standing out, you're not getting the clicks.

And if you're not getting the clicks, you're not getting the conversions or the sales.

What was the moment all this side project stopped feeling like a side project and started feeling like this might actually be turned into something real business.

Yeah.

So it's.

Once I was able to do one, position the book well and saw that it had been gaining royalties month over month, I said, oh, okay, this is something that I can repeat this process.

I've now learned a system.

I've now learned how to position the book and get it in front of other people.

And I have the steps to recreate this process.

So that does tend to happen in publishing.

But what's most important is that you're doing the research before you're publishing.

I understand that struggle of people worried about others just putting books out there.

But in reality, what I am seeing people doing with AI is they're just trying to scramble and have AI put out all of these books as fast as possible.

When it's not about having a race, it's about having a quality book and having a launch.

Now, I'm not against having AI make a book for you, but if you're not putting the time into doing a proper book launch, if you're not investing time into getting reviews for your book, guess what?

It's not going to get sales.

Even if you had AI put together all of your content and you're putting out 10 books a day, I think that AI publishing is fine.

It's just that you have to be transparent about it.

So Amazon does allow you to publish using AI it just asks you now if you.

If your content was AI?

How much of the content did you edit it?

What tool did you use?

Were the images that you generated using AI?

And I think as long as you're being transparent and you're disclosing that, that's absolutely fine.

Again, I think that AI is definitely not something that you want to take a book idea and just ask it to write a complete 30,000 word book on.

I would say if you're going to do AI with book publishing, go chapter by chapter because you want to make sure that your message is getting across.

So coming to your day job, have you seriously thought about leaving your day job at this point?

I am not ready to step away just yet because I will say that there is a lot of additional advantages that I'm getting through my company.

Your insurance and I keep insurance on my family, your 401k like to plan for your retirement accounts, things like that.

And I'm not to the level to like completely uproot and replace everything just yet.

So that is really where I need to scale to and it's part of what I'm working on.

And it is hard.

It's hard to do both things because the one thing you're more passionate about and it takes more time to build and scale while also doing this.

So the hours tend to get capped a little bit in order to what energy and effort I can put into the business to really scale it.

And it's at a slower pace but I know that it will hit the area I want it to go to be able to do it full time.

That was just a trailer but we are about to get into the real specifics of a publishing business, how she's actually making money on Amazon kdp we are going deep on that with Krista so if you want the details, you probably don't want to miss this one.

Make sure you hit that follow button.

It's completely free and I will be dropping the full interview really soon.

And go check out Krista.

She's on YouTube at KDP Self Publishing and her school community is linked in the description below.

And if you want more of this stuff I write about it every week on my own substack, the Sustainable Solopreneur.

Consider subscribing to it and I will see you soon.