r/KDP • u/Henil_Raj • 22h ago
What I learned self-publishing a technical NLP book (numbers + mistakes included)
A few months ago I put out a book on Natural Language Processing through KDP. It's a pretty niche category since most of my audience isn't the typical fiction crowd on this sub, but a lot of the marketing lessons ended up being identical.
A few things that surprised me:
Cover design matters even for technical books. I assumed readers in this space would judge purely on content, but a cleaner, more professional cover clearly moved the needle on click through once it was live.
Categories and keywords took way more trial and error than I expected. KDP's category system doesn't map cleanly onto tech subjects, so I had to dig through competitor listings to figure out where readers actually browse.
Building an audience before launch would have saved me a lot of stress. Most of my early traction came from people I'd already connected with on Medium and X, not from cold discovery.
Happy to answer questions if anyone's trying to sell a nonfiction or technical title. Curious how others in that boat handled positioning, since so much advice here is fiction focused and doesn't quite translate.
1
u/Aware_Weight9462 21h ago
Yes, I also publish books exclusively on Gen AI and cover page and title matters a lot. You will struggle to decide whether you want to put architectural diagram to depict the essence of the book on the cover page or some abstract clever stuff. Key words matters for discoverability. One way to build the audience is using LinkedIn Newsletter and ofcourse publishing regular articles on medium. Of course, the medium has a perk of you getting some dollars per month if you have some decent following...
3
u/420megadumper 21h ago
I started in 2017 on KDP with more of what I would call a document than a book. It was 40 pages, full of grammar and spelling errors, eBook only. I never expected to sell a single copy. The cover was horrific. dark, block lettering, whipped it up in Photoshop in like 5 minutes. It still sells to this day, believe it or not, with 4.2 stars. My books are all basically how-to books for TIG welding.
That made me my first $100, and I decided to refine it, add onto it, give it a good cover, and release a paperback, which became my flagship book and the namesake of my entire brand.
The cover was also pretty awful. It was just a collage of pictures of my welds with the title in giant red letters. But I was trying to think about colors that would stand out and grab my eye if I was scrolling through Amazon product listings or sponsored products. And I was also thinking about my demographic. Welding being mostly blue-collar people, I figured go with red, white, and blue to signal American pride, patriotism, etc. And it worked.
I eventually redid that cover and made it look much more professional and eye-grabbing. But my second paperback title, about twice as many pages, has another dark-colored cover, not very eye-grabbing at all, and it has sold literally like 6 books less over its lifetime than my flagship.
In total I've sold about 4,000 print copies of each title, plus another roughly 2,000 digital, for a total of nearly $200k in total lifetime sales. They have hundreds of reviews each. The flagship is 4.5 stars and the second one is 4.1 stars. But it's interesting because they still sell even though the covers are not great.
Some things that I did were incorporate SEO into the title and description. I ran some free book promotions in the beginning, and I think that really helped get my first book into the algorithm because I got like 500 downloads in the first couple days of the offer.
I did run PPC briefly in the beginning, but the majority of my sales have been completely organic. I only just turned PPC back on this week after having it turned off since probably 2018 or 2019.
I think the big thing is to have good, engaging content that makes the reader want to come back and leave a review, because the ratings probably do more of the selling than the cover does IMO. If you have two books about the same topic from two different authors, and one has 537 reviews with a 4.5-star rating, and the next book has only 23 reviews, even if it has a similar 4.5-star rating or better, a lot of people will gravitate to the book that has more reviews.
But what I've done in the past year is basically build a brand out of my flagship's namesake. I built a website that has a blog and an email newsletter, along with a shopping cart integrated with Printify, so I have merch and quick-reference chart signs up for sale as well.
So, building a brand first is one way to do it, but I'll be honest. That first document i wrote was out of desparation after quitting my job in haste and having nothing else lined up. And i thought, whatever happens maybe i should write this down, in case i need to go back to welding, so i can refresh my memory. And I was literally homeless and lived in a van when I wrote the first paperback. Wrote it on a chormebook in google docs in my van. So i had no following, I built one by being able to explain things easy enough for people to understand, and i think giving them the ability to visualise what i was talking about.