Which is the Better Side Hustle? | KDP vs Audible
There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this new series watch, CapForge’s owner reacts to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!
CapForge Founder and Owner Matt Remuzzi shares his thoughts on Amazon KDP and Audible and if they are good business options to pursue.
Video Transcript:
Business Advice Video:
So what I’m talking about is audible and you probably have heard of it. It’s the audiobook and podcast platform that is owned by Amazon. And this really is kind of like an extension of Amazon KDP. So if you’ve heard of Amazon KDP this is something that you can kind of just tap on almost as an extra business to that because you’re already doing Amazon KDP anyway so you may as well also do audible. You haven’t heard of other essentially what you’re doing with audible is you are selling audiobooks and you’re earning royalties from them, but you don’t have to write these books and you also don’t have to narrate these books. Now we’ve always loved Amazon KDP because of how low the competition is as a side hustle and as an online business model, the audible even trumps Amazon KDP. And I’ll show you what I mean. This is an example to show you just how undersaturated audible actually is. I’m gonna pop one screen here the search results for the keyword of “personal finance for women” for both Amazon KDP on top and then I’ll put audible on the bottom. But you can see how different it is. There’s literally 50,000 results on Amazon KDP and there’s only 110 on audible. Now the cool thing about this is that audiobook demand is honestly growing so much so. At the moment the current market is like 1.7 billion but it’s estimated by like 2030 I think to be over 35 billion. So the demand is just seriously gonna be huge.
Matt’s Review:
Okay well, I think it’s interesting to say that it’s under-saturated or unsaturated because I’m pretty sure there’s over a million books on audible, might be 2 million. There’s a lot so maybe not as many as there are ebooks on Amazon’s Kindle or KDP publishing platform. Just
because it’s a little harder to make an audiobook. You have to actually record the audio whereas with the Kindle books it’s just a PDF so you can spit those out all over the place. Now you could probably have chatGPT write you 15 books a day if you wanted to and flood the market with those. The problem is not producing volume, the problem, as always, is finding customers to buy them, right? So her example, there’s 110 books for personal finance for women on Audible’s platform, great. I would bet that Suze Orman who does personal finance and has a focus towards women is probably sucking up 50% or more of the sales in that category with her one or two or whatever many books she has in that category, right? And then the next biggest seller after Suze Orman probably gets 10% of the sales and then the next five people get another 10% and so on. So you create your audible book on personal finance for women and you throw it up on audible and of however many people are purchasing those every month, let’s say it’s 10,000, you may pick up one or two sales. Now even less until you have some reviews and some reason for people, you know, you got some specialty niche in that within that category. Maybe it’s personal finance advice for pregnant women or older women or teen girls or whatever you got some differentiation but again you’re looking at five or 10 sales a month maybe if you stand out and have decent reviews. It’s not easy to sell a lot of those books, when you’re up against professional competition, recognize names, people who already established in that. If it’s a very very niche category then there’s not a lot of buyers looking at. If it’s a big category like weight loss or how to make money then there’s thousands of competitors. So in either way either case you gotta stand out and be the top of the category to make any kind of real money. And that’s again really hard. You gotta establish your reputation you gotta spend a lot of time marketing and getting your name out there and have a message that’s different, have a customer base that finds your message more appealing than some of the others, at least enough to buy your book and listen to it. So unsaturated I think is an overstatement and misses the point of even if there’s only 10 books in the category, if the first three books take 80% or 90% of the sales you’re gonna have a hard time making a lot of money with something that’s a me too or undifferentiated product. And even if your product is totally different and stands out and has great advice, just getting people to know notice that, recognize it, and choose your book over or in addition to the competition is really hard. So by all means this is a low-cost business to get into and try out if you’re interested, you got something to say give it a shot. Try it on Audible as well as a regular published book on Kindle. But just keep your expectations sort of in line with reality, because I think it’s very tough to make even $500 a month never mind 5,000 a month doing this. Even if you put out 100 books which is a lot of work, unless they’re garbage books – garbage books aren’t gonna get bought, so there’s not really any shortcuts on this one.
