Kindle Cash Flow is a digital course that teaches you how to make money by publishing books through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The course focuses on outsourcing your market research, content generation, and publishing—a 3-step process that Ty Cohen mentions to have made him millions. But is it really as easy as how he makes it out to be?
Amazon offers a fixed royalty of 40% for paperbacks and up to 70% for e-books. The company was expected to pay out over $522 million in royalties just last year and it will keep growing as more books get sold each year. To get a slice of that, you need to produce high-quality content coupled with outstanding marketing.
If you’re a beginner, understand that you have to compete with over 1 million authors globally. And the challenges do not stop with lack of control over your work and royalty payment issues that some authors are experiencing. Ultimately, you still need to be the brains of your outsourced team’s operation.
Unlike Amazon KDP, local lead generation poses fewer risks if you want to invest in an online business, which is why I highly recommend it. It is essentially digital real estate that you have full control of, whether or not the entire process is outsourced. Once you’ve built your site and it’s ranked on google through SEO and digital marketing, local business owners of your chosen niche will pay you for every lead they get.
Kindle Cash Flow Pros And Cons
Pros
The course offers tried and tested modules (however outdated).
Simple and easy-to-follow course contents.
Ty claims to be earning $40,000 a year from Amazon KDP.
Kindle Cash Flow offers free video training.
Cons
The course is pushing for a get-rich-quick scheme.
Course contents have allegedly been copied from Stefan James.
Lots of negative reviews with “scam” being the main point.
The course is more oriented towards “mindset” than Amazon KDP.
Price
Kindle Cash Flow costs $997 or 2 payments of $549.
Refund Policy
Kindle Cash Flow has a no refund policy.
Origin
2019
Reputation
Kindle Cash Flow has a mixture of positive and negative reviews. Many people have mentioned that this course is a scam.
How Do You Make Money From Amazon KDP?
You make money from Amazon KDP when you get paid royalties for every book you sell. Royalties go for 35% or 70% depending on the territory your books are sold. These payments are sent to you 60 days after the end of the month when the sale was reported. This means when you sell a book at any point in January, you’ll receive the royalty payment by the end of March. Generally, it may take 6 months to 1 year before you can make money on KDP.
Kindle Cash Flow teaches you how to earn money on Amazon KDP using Ty Cohen’s 3-step process of market research, content generation, and publishing. The process can be outsourced, hence, making it a passive income that can generate you $40,000 a year according to Ty. However, take note that he has been doing this ever since the beginning of Amazon KDP.
In 2009, Amazon lowered the barrier to entry for aspiring authors. Since then, millions of authors, including Ty Cohen, have used this platform to reach a wider audience for their work. They have also earned millions of dollars and have reached half a billion in royalty payments in 2022.
For a platform that has been running for about 14 years now, you can expect to face a lot of challenges, especially if you’re a beginner. Here’s my take on the disadvantages of publishing on Amazon KDP.What Do You Get With Kindle Cash Flow?
The Kindle Cash Flow course offers a 7-week module from setting up to publishing your books. The course is available on the Kindle Cash Flow website and Lurn, where the former offers bonuses that can’t be accessed in the latter. Personally, I think it’s counterproductive, knowing that Ty Cohen of KCF and Anik Singal of Lurn co-launched this course.
Kindle Cash Flow Modules (KCF Website)
There is a good mix of motivational and technical knowledge if you get the course from the Kindle Cash Flow website. I do suggest not getting swayed by the amount of bonuses you get. If you notice, some items were mentioned repetitively—a strategy to inflate the value you get out of the deal.
Kindle Cash Flow Modules (Lurn)
The Kindle Cash Flow course on Lurn is oriented towards the mindset and marketing aspect of the business. Compare that to the Kindle Cash Flow’s onsite course that costs the same ($997), you get a more technical and in-depth knowledge that is focused on the actual process.
Contrary to Ty Cohen’s claims that you can make easy money by publishing low content books (less than 26 pages), there’s just too many of those circling around. And even if the learning curve is low, and you can sell a book without upfront costs, the saturation is too high for you to profit quickly.
Who Are The Creators Of Kindle Cash Flow?
Ty Cohen and Anik Singal are the creators of Kindle Cash Flow. The course is available on the Kindle Cash Flow website and Lurn.
Ty Cohen has been making money from Amazon Kindle publishing since it started in 2009. He claims to have made $40,000 in a single year and millions in total revenue by publishing low content books. He focuses his work around personal development, productivity, and publishing, as an expert, internet marketer, coach, mentor, speaker, and former radio talk show personality.
According to his website, Ty Cohen has amassed 154,976 email subscribers, 264,835 Facebook fans, 224,279 YouTube viewers, 198,731 Twitter followers, and 7,009 Instagram followers. He has taught thousands of students in 127+ countries.
Anik Singal is the CEO of Lurn, an e-learning website similar to Skillshare, Udemy, or Coursera, that is focused on entrepreneurship. Finance, Copywriting, Email Marketing, Business, and Personal Development are some of the major topics integrated in over 100,000 online courses being added each month. Anik’s success in Lurn is because of his efforts to collaborate with successful coaches and put out courses that bring value to thousands of students worldwide. Some of the key figures he collaborated with are Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, Daymond John, CEO of FUBU and Shark Tank Investor, and Les Brown, motivational speaker and author of Live Your Dreams.
Anik and his business have also been featured on Inc Magazine, The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and talked about curing world poverty on TEDx. How did he get there? By being relentless in his pursuit to build an online business despite the struggles he faced in his early years—being pushed into the medical field by his family, quitting, and studying business at the University of Maryland, which he ended up hating too.
Is Kindle Cash Flow Worth It?
Kindle Cash Flow is worth it if you are looking for a motivational speaker that can get you to take action and start your online business. However, when it comes to publishing and selling books on Amazon KDP, I wouldn’t recommend it. There are other Amazon KDP courses out there like AI Publishing Academy by the Mikkelsen Twins that can teach you how to choose your niche, decide on unique angles for your book, writing and editing your content, before publishing and making money. Free resources are available online and here are my top 6 Amazon KDP courses if you want to pursue this business model of kindle publishing.
Before buying this course, I would recommend doing your due diligence first. Because even though there are substantial lessons that Kindle Cash Flow provides, many testimonials point out to Ty Cohen inflating his own earnings from the platform and a scam. Others have also mentioned that he has made more money from the course than his books, all of which can be heard from Coffeezilla and other website forums like Reddit.
CoffeeZilla: "I've never seen a clear-cut example of someone trying to sell a get-rich-quick scheme."
Coffeezilla made a video about Kindle Cash Flow and the stolen-success-proof controversy between Ty Cohen and Bobby Kim, the host and owner of Indie Author Academy FB Group that conducts market services and workshops for indie authors. Here's what he had to say:
According to Amazon, low-content books are generally repetitive. When the same content gets put out many times over, the market for that information easily becomes saturated. The solution to this is to introduce a new product, or in this case a new kindle book. But, unless you’re driven to keep producing books by yourself or with a team, you will eventually face the limitations of this cycle, and your earning potential becomes a losing potential.
Is Amazon KDP Good For Passive Income?
Amazon KDP is good for passive income if you’re a passionate writer that wants to continuously publish unique and valuable books. But take note that it won’t be completely passive and it takes hard work.
There are two routes for investment you can take to build passive income on Amazon KDP. First is to invest your money to build a team with you being the brains of the whole operation. Second, you can invest your time and resources into marketing, promotions, and the continuous improvement of your writing skills. The most you’ll have to invest on is content creation, because with Amazon’s saturated Kindle ebook market, you can’t settle for mediocrity.
Once you’ve built your catalog of books, you can start earning passive income whenever a person buys them. Amazon offers promotional tools for your Kindle business such as Kindle Countdown Deals and Kindle Unlimited to help increase your sales and earn passive income. There are also advertising tools like Amazon ads, social media ads, and affiliate marketing, to increase your visibility and chances of selling. The more popular and well-reviewed your books become, the more you earn good money that can generate a stable income stream.
What Is My Top Recommendation For Making Money Online?
My top recommendation for making money online is local lead generation to achieve financial freedom. It’s a rank and rent business model that is a more lucrative venture than Amazon KDP, while at the same time easier to start, manage, and scale. There are 68% of local business owners that need help in local lead generation. And 99.9% of businesses in the United States are small businesses, according to Forbes. That is 33.2 million businesses that you can target when you’re looking for a niche to start one.
Once you’ve built your site, you’re going to need SEO and marketing to rank your site and look for clients. You can either do this yourself or outsource the entire thing and get your site up and running for less than $500. You can earn about $500 to $2000+ a month from a single website and you can scale up by targeting a wider area, a different niche, or a different service altogether. This is an online business that gives you full control and earns you the passive income you’re working for.
