in this video I'll show you exactly how I outsource and automate 99% of my Amazon KDP business So if you're new to the channel my name is Sean I build two multiple six figures a year Amazon KDP businesses And I'm at a point where I literally only work a couple hours a week on my Amazon KDP business to maintain that income If I'm launching a new book maybe I work a couple hours a week but if not then I literally work zero hours a week because every single step in this business that requires attention is basically outsourced and it's handled by my team So if you want a similar setup for your business and have more time for yourself as well then this video is for you So let's get right into exactly how I built a fully automated KDP business In this video we're going to cover what task I outsource where to find talents and how I spend less than an hour a week on my KDP business So before we go and learn about the exact outsourcing and automating strategies there's one thing you have to understand and that is that in every business you're either investing time or investing money right you're paying with time or paying with money So you can try and save money by doing everything yourself But you have to understand that there's this thing called the opportunity cost right if you're spending five hours doing a task that you can literally pay somebody five bucks 10 bucks to do it for you know then it just doesn't make sense You just lost that five hours that you could have done you know something else that would have made way more than five or 10 bucks right so you know you have to kind of think of it that way when it comes to business Basically you have to identify what are the tasks that I currently do that I can outsource somebody else can come in and do this for me right and what are the tasks that I really should be doing myself that's going to move the needle forward the most right there are tasks out there that you can easily outsource You can pay somebody very cheaply and they can easily handle what you're trying to do right and there are tasks out there that are a lot harder to outsource a lot harder for someone to come in and replace you So with that being said there are two important tasks that I still do myself Starting with keyword research So keyword research is one of those things where yes it's possible to outsource but it's a lot harder than other tasks Plus it is one of the most important steps in publishing So if you mess this up like literally anything else you do uh really doesn't matter right you can have the most amazing book but if it's in a bad keyword bad topic that nobody cares about then you're not going to make any money So it's super super important Uh so I still do this part myself because I'm really really good at it But what I do to save time is I batch research months worth of keywords at once because I'm at a point where I can literally just sit down couple hours and I can just find a bunch of keywords uh that I can go and publish in which is basically worth multiple months if not a year worth of content that I can create just from that couple hours of me sitting down So that's something that I still do The next one is title creation So this is also something I still do myself However I've been using AI a lot And what's cool about AI is that you can actually tell AI the type of book title that you'd like in terms of structure And you just ask it to give you something like that for this new topic that you're trying to write about right so it makes the process a lot faster If you would hire you can go to Upwork you can go to Fiverr but honestly it's probably best if you just do this yourself So as an example right the way I've been using AI is let's say this is my title or it doesn't have to be your title it can be your competitor title too I just take an example book title that I like I go to Chad and I basically just ask it to give me book title ideas for a book on whatever topic that I'm trying to write about right following the title structure that you know that I like and just like that right so it's super similar to the structure that I like which is this one but it's applied to the topic in this case decluttering Uh so it really speeds up the process From here I obviously tweak it because it's never perfect as is but you know it definitely helps a lot So those are the two tasks that I do myself Now let's go into how I outsource things right so the first one is book outline So book outline is basically you know creating a skeleton basically creating chapters that we should include in our book And this is something that you can outsource This is something that you know a good researcher can do right so I hire someone on Upwork Okay And what they can do is use AI plus you know do their own research So using their human eye uh to it and I typically pay between 50 to 100 bucks uh to be completely honest it's more closer to 50 bucks uh for the type of books that I'm publishing uh for a 30kword non-fiction book right so if you're doing more technical you know more complicated topics you probably want to pay a hundred bucks a little bit more for someone to create an outline but you can easily hire someone like this on Upwork In terms of what the person you hired uh will be doing to create this outline once again you can use AI to get a baseline idea and then you will add manual research to it So I just asked Chajbid a follow-up question saying "Can you create a detailed book outline for this book?" And then we have you know a lot of these stuff right and so from here you kind of have to look at it and say "All right which one is something that I want to keep which one I don't like and we're just going to ditch right?" So you start filtering out uh these chapters subsections right and then you start adding it to a Google doc And from here you will add it with additional research Like let's just say this is my competitor book right and I'm going to look inside here And I'm just going to look at the table of contents and start asking myself the same thing Is this a good chapter you know is this something that I don't need in my book right and I start you know adding the ones that I like and not add the ones that I don't like right so I'm not just ripping off my competitors I'm going to do this with multiple books you know but if the competitor has a chapter inside their book and they are a bestseller right then that means that customers first of all enjoyed the chapter you know and the bestselling competitor obviously did their research and based on their research they know that this chapter was important to add in the book right so I'm just going to piggyback off of their research right it's going to save me some time too So that's how I'm going to start plucking their chapters I'm also going to come down and read the reviews here I'm going to read a bunch of reviews or you know when I say I will do it I'm talking about you know the the person that I'm going to hire right they will start reading the reviews and basically find patterns in terms of what customers like what they didn't like about this book And then whatever they liked I'm going to try and incorporate it into my book What they didn't like we're not going to try and do that And so that is how you can combine AI plus manual research uh to have a very very detailed book outline So now that you understand the process uh you can go and hire someone on Upwork and train them on how you do it But that is the book outline The next one is ghostriting So ghostriting I use a ghostriting company when testing new niches right which I use the urban writers as my ghost writing company Once I decide to build a niche and I go deep in it I try to hire a dedicated writer on Upwork instead of you know continuously using a ghostriting company The reason why is because it's very important to have the same tonality writing style book content you know stories that you incorporate in the book if you're building out a brand right so it's best to work with the same writer You don't have to you know I made it work many many times but it's much much easier Uh so for that reason working with ghostriting companies sometimes it's tricky to you know work with the same person right so eventually I want to shift towards working with someone direct on Upwork Now if you need a step-by-step tutorial on how to hire ghostriters I do have a video that shows you how to do that So I'll leave a link to this video in the description below All right next one is illustrations So honestly you can go to Canva you can go to Creative Fabrica A lot of people try to create you know low content medium content books by trying to plug you know a bunch of different free stock images that they get from those sites also they try to use AI for it and what happens is that the book doesn't have any consistency in terms of the images right they all look different you know in terms of style and that doesn't work out well to be completely honest like you're going to make some money but if you want to make big money uh it's probably not something that you should be doing I still use Canva and Creative Fabrica to get simple images but I wouldn't rely on that 100% right typically what I do is to hire illustrator uh and I pay them for unique custom illustrations uh in terms of the rate let's just say you're trying to create something like this bold and easy coloring pages right this is something you can literally pay someone $3 to $5 per page Okay so this is a $3 to5 image Okay if you want something more complex and it's going to be up to you know $10 or more Uh but you know by working with someone longterm you can negotiate a bulk order discount or a long-term discount right so there's a lot of negotiations that comes into it but that's what I do I do have my own illustrator that I work with Next one is editing and proofreading So once your book is written right you have to go and you know do the editing and proofreading Now if you hire a good ghostwriter they can do the editing and proofreading themselves right and obviously you should read the book yourself before you publish obviously You know even if it's proof read by somebody else you should still read it to make sure it's good But on top of that I try to have another set of eyes go through the book right so I hire a separate editor and proofreader So what I've done is my editor actually do the book outline as well So she started as an editor first right i hired her as an editor but later on I trained her to do the outline And the reason why is because you know when you're creating a book outline you do a lot of research on the topic right you have to do a lot of research So by going through the process you kind of become very knowledgeable in the topic right and you also created the outline So once the writer comes in and start writing the book and you go and check it right proofread and edit it you know if the writer followed the outline that you created or not right you also know what information is bad what information is good right you know what part to change and what not because you did the outline research and you are pretty knowledgeable about the topic So that's why I think having the editor do the outline makes sense It's very synergistic in terms of the task But that's what I do So the editor gains expertise through the outline research It leads to better quality proof reading and editing And uh for the editing and proof reading I basically pay $100 per 30,000 words Now if you're watching this and you're like "That is so cheap hundred bucks you know for a 30kword editing." Well you got to understand that the book that's written is pretty much there's no errors because the ghostriter they already did the proof reading and editing themselves right so you don't have to do this crazy edits where you take a chunk of this portion from one chapter and put it into another chapter You're not moving content around the editor all they're doing is reading through and fixing typos picking up little typos here and there if it even exists right so basically you're just reading the book You're not really doing editing you know so that's why it's very chill You're done in like an hour or two hours So I think a 100 bucks for that is a pretty good rate So the next one is book covers So for low and medium content books you know the whole point of doing low and medium content books is because you don't want to invest so much money up front into the business right um so typically it doesn't really make sense to spend a lot of money uh for a book cover for this unless you know you already have a brand established and you're really trying to go hard with this niche If that's the case I'll be paying more But just to get started I recommend using platforms like Fiverr for a book cover paying between 5 to 30 bucks uh I would start with that and then you know increase as I make more money from this brand because the purpose once again is to keep production costs low so you can make these books at a low cost start making money building the business and then you can invest more So as an example some of the gigs that I recommend personally would be someone like this Uh she does a book cover for $15 And she specializes in low content books Something like this I think it looks pretty nice It's much better than what I can make So I would start with this gig Uh if I'm trying to go into low content medium content This is another example $45 You can get a book cover but also a book interior And he does a really really good job as well So if you guys want to check out these gigs I'll leave a link in the description Now if I'm doing high content books you know the purpose of high content books is I'm trying to make big money right and I really want to make sure every single step is five stars 10 out of 10 quality right so for that reason I'm going to go hard on the book cover as well So the platform I use is 99 designs or Upwork to hire a book cover designer The cost typically is between $100 to $200 per cover I personally have a designer that I pay $115 per book cover uh delivered in all three formats so ebook paperback audio So you don't have to spend that much uh in the beginning but you know you can build up to it once again Uh but this ensures really you know high quality designs The next one is book formatting So book formatting is one of those things that you can honestly just do it yourself uh if you want to spend some time right but at the same time it's cheap to outsource So you really got to ask yourself is the time that I'm spending learning book formatting and outsourcing worth it right if you're going to outsource book formatting for let's say 50 bucks you know and you spend four hours doing it right and so if you make 20 bucks an hour at your day job and you spend four hours that means you spent $80 worth of time doing this but you could have outsourced it for 50 bucks So you just lost $30 right so that's kind of how I look at everything And that's kind of how you should be looking at it if you are a business owner But this is how I do it So I have a VA virtual assistant uh who formats my ebook in a paperback And since he is a virtual assistant that does a lot of other things as well and this is just one part of the task um I pay less Like I pay like I think it comes down to like 20 bucks per book that's formatted right uh so it's very very easy to outsource very cheap You can even hire a VA and have uh someone watch this video on book formatting that I filmed and then just have them start doing it right super easy If you want to check out this video I'll leave a link in the description If you would hire someone that already knows book formatting uh on Fiverr as an example it's probably going to be between 50 to 100 bucks which I still think is a fair price Once again you can do it yourself to cut costs but it's better to outsource especially for quality right and also time savings So if you want a very simple basic book formatting uh that's very affordable there's actually a gig on Fiverr that'll do it for 20 bucks which I think is a really really good rate So I'll leave a link to this gig below but yeah they will go and format your book and that is all you need The next one is cover conversions So what do I mean by cover conversions well that is uh once you have your book cover like the front cover uh converting that into paperback print hard cover and even audiobook cover right so the converting process of that because you don't want to just sell your book as an ebook right you want to you know sell it in many different formats Uh this ensures broader distribution and you'll obviously make more money that way So the simplest way to outsource this honestly Fiverr because this is one of those things where you can outsource super cheap So you can literally outsource this for like five to 10 bucks So here are some examples Uh we have Suda over here right five bucks I've literally been working with this person for like 10 years It's crazy So five bucks will convert your ebook into a ACX or audiobook cover And this one if you want to take your book and convert it into a hard cover you know it's 10 bucks You can see that I work with them in the past So once again the link is in the description So I think we all know how profitable audio book is but even hard coverver books it usually doesn't sell much but it's still you know something that you can you know create for 5 10 bucks just upload forget about it and you start making you know some sales here and there and for each sale let's say you make three bucks you make two sales you make your money back and then you make a couple sales and you're profiting right and this is all passive so I really try to maximize my distribution uh every single time so the next one is uploading to KDP so this is also something that I outsource as well I don't upload my books to these platforms So KDP ACX Ingram Spark other platforms that we publish books in Uh I have my personal VA handle all of this right and I pay $5 for each upload I think I'm paying a little too much to be completely honest I want to pay my VA good because he's been with me for a long time So you know that's not an issue But to be completely honest like uploading your book to KDP takes like 20 minutes max right so you know that I'm paying like a $15 per hour rate And my VA is from Bangladesh which is like an extremely good rate for them right i personally think you can pay four bucks an hour for this which means you're paying per hour and it's only going to take once again 20 30 minutes for them Now before I started implementing this strategy I obviously emailed KDP and checked if this was allowed right somebody else logging into your KDP account Uh and they said it's completely fine You just have to trust the person which makes sense So we've been doing it for years No problem Uh but yeah you do have to trust them because who knows they can go and you know update the bank account information and stuff However uh every time they try to update the bank account information you should receive a text verification code right before they can even log in So obviously you can prevent them from doing it without you knowing So that is a little safety measure that you have but you still want to trust them So maybe start outsourcing this once you work with a person for you know couple months or to a year All right next one is getting reviews So there are many ways to get reviews right building an email list is the best way best long-term way but it takes time Now you can also go into different Facebook groups offer free copies of your book you can follow up get reviews That's more manual time consuming but that's one way of doing it And you can use review services like Book Bounty if you want to shortcut the process But even with this one there's a little bit of work You have to go in leave a review for somebody else you know get points ask for a review for your book So it still takes some time So I have my VA do all of these So my VA goes into my email list sends out the email saying "Hey who wants to read my book for free right pass out the free copy get reviews on Amazon." Sometimes I have him go into different Facebook groups and ask for reviews Uh we don't do a lot of that because we have our email list built up And we also use Book Bounty right so he goes in you know do the reviewing on Book Bounty collect the points and then ask for review So all of this is outsourced as well By the way if you don't know what Book Bounty is it's one of the easiest ways to get reviews fast if you're doing Amazon KDP Uh so I talked about this in a couple videos this is their website It's one of the fastest ways and easiest way to get reviews for your book I do have a tutorial video on how Book Bounty works So if you want to check it out I'll leave a link to this video in the description So the next one is email marketing So like I just said email marketing you can use it to ask reviews right you can also nurture your email list by sending out some value emails you know some quick tips those kind of things sharing your stories whatever email uh that is nurturing your email list right getting them to know you Now you can also use it to promote book launches So getting actual book sales and all of this is basically sending out different types of emails Well my VA does this as well because every single book launch we just go through the same exact process So what I've done is I basically wrote out a email template for every single thing right for pre-launch asking for reviews I have an email template for that Once the book is launched uh the multi- email sequence that we do I have a template for that Right so my VA comes in and he literally just switches out the book title from the template Everything else is the same So we're sending basically the same email to the customer you know like once a month right but no one remembers the email they read a month ago right so it works So my VA update the book title and link in the email templates This ensures regular engagement with subscribers increases book sales review conversions and saves me a lot of time and effort All right the next one is Amazon ads So for Amazon ads I highly recommend you just start doing it yourself instead of outsourcing it I do understand that when you just get started with KDP it's overwhelming working with Amazon ads It's confusing Um but still you should push through it and learn the basics because if you outsource without knowing how it works there's no way for you to quality check And that's very very important right so you have to know how to do it before you go and outsource it Okay so do it yourself first but eventually you can outsource this as well right so you can use Upwork and hire a let's just say a virtual assistant You train them up on it That's the cheapest way but their performance is probably the worst out of all the options right the next option is to hire someone who already knows how to run Amazon ads and they're offering it as a service That's like hiring an agency And this is the most expensive way but it's the most hands-off And this is using a service like asteroid right but this can cost a decent amount So the middle ground is using a service like Adigy uh which previously known as Azology They changed the name a little bit but it looks like this So this is Adigy Basically it is a AI powered software that will go and help you optimize Amazon ads So if you have the basic understanding of how Amazon ads work and you're just burning a lot of time optimizing ads every single day then this will go and help you uh save a lot of time right so you don't even need to hire someone because this software is basically your hire You know they're going to go and do things for you So essentially you can use this to cut down the time you spend managing Amazon ads from you know let's say hours a day to just one hour a week At least that's what they promise on their website So this is a really really good starter option if you want to start outsourcing Amazon ads I highly recommend this A lot of my students uh in my paid program is using this and they're loving it So you know I can confidently recommend it Uh once again the link is in the description And AD is created by the same person who does Azroid Azroid is an actual Amazon ad agency So this is more hands-on right uh but they will manage the entire thing So AD is like working with the software but you still doing you know little bit of Amazon ads yourself This is completely handsoff and this is what I actually use So that was a quick overview on the task that I outsource and you know my thought process uh with each one With that being said if you want to start building a team uh here are some additional tips that I think will be helpful So number one you want to use a password sharing tool So sharing password is a inevitable part uh when working with other people Like if you're going to have someone upload a book on KDP you will have to you know share the password for KDP But directly sharing password is kind of risky right so there is like sharing your KDP account password That's a little sketch if they know the password So you can use a password manager like LastPass LastPass is free It's completely free And you can actually share your password and user ID with someone without them actually seeing it So you can have your team download LastPass and they can log in to whatever site you're sharing with LastPass without seeing your password If that makes sense But that is a really useful way to share your password The next thing is as you start scaling your KDP business you're going to go from just working on one book at a time to now you're juggling multiple book projects at the same time And it becomes very confusing like you know what we have to do for this book and you know where we're at with this book and what do we have to do with this book right so that's why it is very important to use a project management tool this is essential for scaling and publishing multiple books at the same time prevents confusion and tracking book progress right it also helps streamline workflow and organization uh the best one is using asana so just look up Asauna like I cannot give you a step-by-step tutorial on how to use asauna or how to use LastPass but honestly you just have Google it or YouTube how to use it right uh I'm just telling you what I use and now you can take it from there doing more of your research But Asana it's free once again You can create a board super easy So that is how I manage our book projects Now this is a big tip uh for you guys So basically once you start managing different book projects right and now you have a ghost writer you have a book cover designer you have an editor and you have a bunch of people in your team Now the next problem that's going to happen is everyone is reporting to you Okay so once the ghostriter finished writing the book they're going to send the book file to you You get the file and you know you're like "Okay let me send this book file to the editor right and the editor finished reading the the book." And the editor is going to you know provide some feedback some revision requests but the editor is going to you know tell me the revision request and send me the file which now I have to send it over to the ghostriter and the ghostriter will make the fix give it to me and I have to give it to the editor And now I'm the middleman between the ghostriter and the editor And literally just being the middleman takes a lot of time So this is a huge tip for you to scale is that you want to remove yourself from being the middleman And a big secret on how you do that is to have the ghostriter have the editor have the book cover designer and other freelancers that you hire in one big group chat Right so if you hired them on Upwork uh you can do a Upwork group chat If you hired them somewhere else you can use tools like Asana or Slack and they can all communicate there Uh or a WhatsApp group WhatsApp group might be a little messy but it doesn't matter It just has to be a group chat so that they can all communicate with each other without me being involved right so what I do is I add all my freelancers in a group chat on Upwork Okay so I got the writer I got the editor I got the designer They all communicate directly with each other without me being involved which is super cool So the way it works is the writer writes the book Once they're done writing the book they will tag the editor and the editor comes in and edit it provide revision requests tag the writer right so the writer comes back and you know revise the book and then tag the editor Editor checks again Editor approves it right then tag the designer or illustrator to go and you know add some illustrations in between Illustrator adds that and then once the entire book is done then they will tag me for the final check So up until the final check I literally do nothing like I'm not even involved in the conversation and the book being made right so that is a really really cool tip If you're just getting started this is way too advanced but if you're in publishing for a while you're juggling multiple books and you're in this situation I feel like this tip have helped you a lot right so let me know in the comments if it actually helped you Anyways that is how I have the setup All right a couple more things you can outsource which is bookkeeping and taxes So initially I started doing bookkeeping myself just using QuickBooks but I hated it Quickbooks was super confusing and I was spending a lot of time right i did that for like a year but you know I started making more money to the point where this the time that I spent doing QuickBooks just wasn't worth it So instead I outsourced this as well So I pay my CPA 100 bucks per month per company right to do QuickBooks for it Once again I tried QuickBooks but it's way too timeconuming too confusing Some people make it work but it's just not for me Now that I outsource this right it frees up my time to go and make more money more money than the hundred bucks a month that I'm spending here So in terms of how you can find a CPA this one I don't have a website or anything You just have to kind of ask around try to find someone in your area but I'm sure there are a lot of people that's looking for extra work So to recap I outsource most tasks except for keyword research and title creation right i oversee the task uh to maintain quality control Like I check you know the book cover that people provide right i check the book writing I you know check the illustrations and stuff but in terms of actually doing it I don't do it right i hire somebody else to do it for me So I'm basically the CEO overseeing people make sure everything is done correctly and efficiently but I don't do the work myself So I just want to quickly touch on the myth of 100% passive income Because the truth is no business is ever 100% passive I think the closest thing to 100% passive income you're going to get to is if you invest in a dividend stock and it pays dividends without you doing anything right but dividend investing is not really a business It's an investment It's a passive investment right so in terms of an active business publishing Amazon KDP is I think the closest thing to passive income but it's not 100% passive Publishing can be semi-passive with the right systems It requires some oversight Yes it's not 100% passive You're still checking people's work but you know it's minimal daily work Like you once again I spend like an hour a week right so you want to act like a CEO not a worker The CEO do not do the work themselves They hire others for writing formatting cover design They oversee the operations so you can focus on growth So hope you enjoyed the video and if you need coaching on exactly how to implement everything that we talked about today I do have a complete Amazon KDP coaching program One of the modules in the coaching program is dedicated to outsourcing systematizing automation those kind of things right hiring people So I have a very in-depth training on that in the program If you guys want to learn more then check out the first link in the description It'll take you to a page like this you can apply for a free 30 minute strategy call and see if this program is a good fit for you Now this program is not just a course It's a course and coaching hybrid So you get one-on-one coaching a lot of bonuses and much more which you can ask about uh on the free call but we got a lot of students that are absolutely crushing it We got multiple students who did over $100,000 in a single month Isn't that crazy right and we even have one student who did $279,000 in a single month which is absolutely insane So it's the first link in the description below as well as all the tools and resources that I recommend in this video is also in the description If you enjoyed this video and if you made it till the end let me know in the comments Comment automate and uh I'll try and answer as many questions as possible But with that being said leave a like subscribe Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one