Make a Killing on Kindle

Have you ever wondered why some authors skyrocket to Kindle fame while others languish in obscurity? In Make A Killing On Kindle, Michael Alvear pulls back the curtain on Amazon’s ecosystem to reveal an unexpectedly simple truth: selling books successfully isn’t about hustling on social media or chasing followers—it’s about mastering Kindle’s internal marketplace. Alvear argues that authors must stop looking outside the platform for salvation—blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts—and instead learn to play by Amazon’s own rules. His central mantra, Attract. Engage. Convert., forms the backbone of his guerilla marketing system for writers ready to turn their ebooks into reliable income streams.

The Pain Before the Strategy

Alvear begins with raw honesty. He confesses that before developing his system, his Kindle sales were so poor he cursed daily—until he discovered the tactics that multiplied his income tenfold in a few days. Drawing from a 20-year career in advertising and marketing (even winning Adweek’s Media Plan of the Year), he realized that Kindle works differently from any other ecosystem. You can’t impose traditional marketing on it; you must sell within Amazon’s environment. Without that mindset shift, an author can waste years chasing readers outside the Kindle marketplace and still fail.

The Three Phases That Drive Sales

Kindle success, Alvear explains, happens through three distinct but connected phases:

• Attract – Your book must be visible and appealing enough to draw browsers to your page. This means optimizing keywords, crafting clickable titles, and designing enticing covers. If your book doesn’t show up in searches or looks mediocre, no amount of tweets can save it.
• Engage – Once readers arrive, they need an emotional or intellectual hook. This comes through compelling book descriptions, attention-grabbing formatting, and strong opening pages in the Look Inside sample.
• Convert – Finally, a browser must feel confident enough to click “Buy.” That requires addressing doubts through reviews, pricing psychology, and a professional author presence that establishes trust.

These three stages are more than words—they echo fundamental concepts in marketing science. (For example, Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing emphasizes attracting qualified buyers and building trust before conversion, paralleling Alvear’s process.) Each step becomes an actionable checkpoint for writers to evaluate how their books move readers from curiosity to commitment.

Destroying the Sacred Cows of Author Marketing

Alvear takes a sledgehammer to three pervasive myths. First, he dismantles the fantasy of the “Next Amanda Hocking”—the myth that lightning will strike and a book will magically go viral. Second, he argues against the cult of the “author platform.” Unless you’re a celebrity or expert selling services, audiences built through blogs and newsletters rarely translate into real Kindle sales. Third, he condemns social media promotion as a colossal waste of time. He backs this up with concrete math: a 10,000-visitor blog, with an average 0.3% click-through and 4% conversion rate, might yield one sale per month. Alvear’s humor here—pleading for “rat poison instead of Xanax”—makes the data unforgettable.

Kindle as Its Own Ecosystem

The pivotal insight in Alvear’s system is ecological: Kindle is self-contained. External efforts barely influence its internal ranking algorithm. Book buyers behave differently when browsing Amazon—they search, compare covers, skim descriptions, and rely on reviews rather than ads. If Kindle is an ecosystem, then every successful book is an organism perfectly adapted to its environment. Like a biologist studying how species survive, Alvear teaches you to observe how books interact—how categories, keywords, and reviews form a web that nourishes or starves a title.

Marketing Within Amazon’s Walls

Instead of scattering your energy across social media, Alvear’s guerilla approach focuses on a dozen high-impact actions you can complete in under 18 hours: choose the right categories, write SEO-savvy descriptions, design magnetic covers, and strategically place reviews and links where they matter most. The restrictions of Amazon—only seven keyword phrases, two categories, and limited description space—become creative constraints that sharpen your strategy. That economy of effort mirrors J.A. Konrath’s principle in Be the Monkey: direct promotion inside Amazon outweighs all external noise.

Why This Framework Matters

The power of Alvear’s book lies not in fancy jargon but in its accessibility. He speaks as a wounded practitioner turned strategist, proof that failure can teach more than success. His humor keeps the tough truths from feeling bitter, and the Attract–Engage–Convert model gives struggling authors a clear map through the fog of online marketing. In a world obsessed with followers and platforms, Alvear reminds writers that the most important audience isn’t on Twitter—it’s already on Kindle, searching for their next read. You just have to make sure they find—and buy—yours.

Michael Alvear’s first major revelation in Make A Killing On Kindle is shocking but liberating: for most writers, building an “author platform” is a waste of time. The common wisdom says you should blog, tweet, gather subscribers, and nurture an audience. Alvear dismantles this by showing that conversion rates for non-celebrities are abysmally low—so low you’d sell fewer books than coins found in sofa cushions.

The Math of Futility

He backs his claim with devastating numbers. The average banner ad click-through rate is 0.3%. Of those who click, only about 4% buy something. So if your blog gets 10,000 visitors a month—a figure most writers never achieve—you’ll sell roughly one book monthly. Even if your results are ten times better than the national average, you’d still only sell 120 books a month. For someone dreaming of quitting their day job, that’s heartbreak disguised as math.

(In contrast, Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents and Seth Godin’s model of tribes prove that genuine influence requires hundreds of thousands of followers; without scale, platforms simply don’t convert.) Alvear’s message: don’t ski uphill trying to reach readers who won’t buy. Focus instead on leveraging Amazon’s internal engines.

Celebrity vs. Civilians

He divides authors into two tribes. Celebrities, like Jennifer Lawson of The Bloggess, already have massive audiences—her blog had three million monthly views before her book deal. They can use those fans to move thousands of units. Thought leaders, such as consultants or business experts, can justify platforms because books validate their expertise and attract high-paying clients. But for ordinary fiction writers and unknown nonfiction authors, platforms demand years of unpaid labor to yield trivial sales. “Best selling books create an author platform,” Alvear quips, “not the other way around.”

Personal Experiment: A Marketing Tragedy

Alvear’s own story is a cautionary tale. As a sex and relationships expert, he built five blogs, three Facebook pages, and two Twitter accounts, with a combined audience of 30,000 followers. He had TV exposure and print columns syndicated nationwide. After three years, his first Kindle books barely sold. The platform failed because followers wanted free advice, not paid ebooks—and because those marketing efforts existed outside Kindle’s ecosystem.

When he abandoned the platform and focused on optimizing covers, SEO descriptions, and categories within Kindle, his books rocketed up the charts. The result was existential clarity: success came from working inside Amazon’s soil, not farming outside its walls.

The Freedom of Focus

Dropping the platform frees authors to spend their creative energy where it counts—writing more books and refining their Kindle presence. Years spent learning HTML widgets and SEO plugins could yield multiple ebooks instead. Alvear even jokes that building a platform makes Gandhi reach for brass knuckles. His humor underscores a deeper truth: obsession with platform stems from fear—the fear that without constant self-promotion, success will vanish. His data proves the opposite: platform addiction leads to paralysis, not progress.

In the end, this chapter flips the standard publishing hierarchy. The path to visibility isn’t through shouting louder online—it’s through the quiet precision of metadata, design, and placement within the Kindle ecosystem. When your book shines in Amazon’s search results, readers will find it naturally. The platform advice peddled by agents and seminars, Alvear warns, belongs “in the graveyard of good intentions.”

If author platforms are useless, what about social media? Alvear answers that question with unflinching clarity: social media doesn’t sell books—it sells illusions. He compares authors chasing followers to the Sufi tale of Nasrudin searching for his lost keys under a streetlight because it’s easier to look where there’s light, even though he lost them in the dark. Writers, he argues, keep searching for sales “under the streetlight” of Facebook and Twitter instead of where success actually lies—the dim corners of the Kindle ecosystem.

The Trap of Vanity Metrics

Blog subscriptions, likes, and retweets create seductive feedback loops. But Alvear’s data from his own blogging career shows the futility: his site with 25,000 monthly visitors produced only fifty PDF sales—and even fewer Kindle sales. Worse, since only 8–10% of Americans owned a Kindle at the time, most followers couldn’t buy his ebook even if they wanted to. “Selling Kindle books outside Kindle,” he writes, “violates the first rule of online selling: never force people to leave the site to buy.”

(Other marketers like Tim Grahl in Your First 1000 Copies acknowledge this reality, too, noting email lists serve better for direct digital sales—but Alvear contends even email lists are slow-building and inefficient.) The bright lights of social media distract authors from the darker, more rewarding work of optimizing keywords, categories, and pricing.

Why “Followers” Don’t Equal Buyers

Alvear’s tone mixes tragedy and comedy. He jokes about contemplating murder or suicide while troubleshooting his blogs, painting a vivid picture of tech frustration. His larger point is that people follow authors for entertainment, not commerce. They come for free wisdom or humor, not to pay for books. Unless you’re J.K. Rowling or a verified influencer, those followers exist outside the Kindle-buying core. For most indie writers, three years of social media labor yields incremental sales—he calls it “rolling up the quarters in the back of the sofa.”

The False Promise of Email Lists

Email marketing fares little better. Open rates average 30–34%, and only 1% of readers click through to buy. After years running lists for his workshops, Alvear found the ROI negligible. Subscribers sign up for entertainment, not solicitation. Unless emails deliver consistent value—something that takes huge time investment—they don’t drive real Kindle revenue. Once again, he urges writers to stop giving away their writing energy in endless unpaid outreach.

The Enlightened Shift

Alvear’s final counsel is brutally simple: forget social media until you’re already successful. After your first book hits big, followers will come naturally—and those fans will help launch your next title. But for now, stop chasing the keys under the streetlight. Kindle’s dark ecosystem may be less glamorous, but that’s where the treasure lies. When you focus on the platform that actually processes the sale—Amazon—you shift from noise-making to profit-making.

A title is the gateway drug to your book. In Alvear’s world, a title isn’t just an artistic flourish—it’s a conversion tool. He teaches authors to write for scanners, not readers. Online audiences don’t ponder meanings; they skim lightning-fast. If your title doesn’t instantly convey what the book is about, they’ll scroll past. This insight reframes titling from poetry to marketing psychology.

The Scan Test

Alvear’s central test is unforgiving: can someone tell what your book is about in five seconds? For nonfiction, clarity beats cleverness. He showcases an infertility guide whose vague title—Hopeful Heart, Peaceful Mind: Managing Infertility—failed to sell because readers couldn’t tell whether it covered treatments, meditation, or therapy. His revised version, Managing The Stress Of Infertility: How To Balance Your Emotions, Get The Support You Need, And Deal With Painful Social Situations When You’re Trying To Get Pregnant, shot into the Top 10 in its category within two weeks. The difference: no ambiguity, clear audience, and direct benefits.

Brainstorming Like a Copywriter

Alvear offers practical ways to find titles. Scour your manuscript for catchy phrases—his own sister found Men Are Pigs But We Love Bacon buried on page 25. Build word lists of verbs and nouns describing your book, look at your genre’s bestsellers, free-associate attributes (“strong” → “gorillas” → Gorilla Glue), and play with clichés or rhymes (Beauty and the Yeast). Each technique forces creativity through structure—a trademark of his advertising background.

He classifies titles into six types—Shock Titles, Story/Metaphor Titles, Contrarian Titles, One-word Titles, Long Titles, and Dialogue Titles—and emphasizes the power of alliteration and rhythm. Whether it’s To Kill A Mockingbird or Why Men Marry Bitches, sound drives memorability.

Testing Titles With Real People

Don’t test titles by email, he warns—read them aloud. You want reactions, not reflections. If someone laughs, stutters, or pauses, the title is telling you everything you need to know. Alvear gathers a “council of book murderers”—honest advisors from writing or marketing backgrounds who are unafraid to kill weak titles. In five minutes, he says, you’ll know which title hits the gut. It’s marketing’s version of speed dating: instant chemistry matters more than reasoned essays.

The Freedom to Change

Unlike traditional publishing, Kindle offers flexibility. If your title flops, change it. That agility turns titling into an iterative process—test, tweak, relaunch—just like ads. The moral: a title should sell your book before a reader even clicks. When clarity and emotion meet cadence, you’ve found the sweet spot where art meets commerce.

“Be a B-O-B,” Alvear says—Best On Board. In his universe, a Kindle cover isn’t decoration; it’s your second sales funnel. Because thumbnail images dominate the Kindle store, your cover’s job is to ignite “click lust” in a space no bigger than a postage stamp. In this chapter, he translates years in advertising into a design philosophy that treats aesthetics as persuasion.

Never DIY Your Cover

His blunt rule: “Never, EVER design your own book cover.” Amateurs produce muddled signals, and first impressions on Amazon are irreversible. Hiring a professional designer is the best investment you’ll make. Even a $300 design can pay off exponentially; Alvear likens it to turning a small oven on to make the dough rise—you need heat to bake success. He details designer tiers from high-end pros like Carl Graves to budget options on 99designs and Elance, teaching authors how to manage creatives effectively.

Constraints Breeding Creativity

The Kindle’s tiny format forces specific design rules: bold fonts, crisp edges, clear imagery, and legible titles even at postage size. Subtlety and complexity vanish in miniature. Alvear calls it “cover design for the unendowed”—you must communicate the book’s tone and genre at a glance. His creative briefs read like advertising campaigns, specifying target audiences, emotional triggers, and marketing promises. A dating book, for example, should convey fun and flirtation through color and typography, not just pictures.

Demanding Excellence

Good design requires demanding collaboration. Alvear invokes a Jewish grandmother joke—when her lost grandson reappears, she complains “He had a hat.” The point: never settle. He rejected twelve versions of his own book cover because he didn’t “feel the love.” Only persistence produced a design that stood out without cliché. This perfectionism reflects the core insight: a cover isn’t a beauty contest, it’s a battle for attention.

The ROI of Visual Seduction

Visual quality signals literary quality. Readers unconsciously link good design with good writing—an association proven in marketing studies and echoed by Barnes & Noble’s Patricia Bostelman. Your cover tells buyers your book belongs among professionals, not amateurs. When your thumbnail glows on a crowded page, you win the first crucial click. In Alvear’s guerilla framework, that single click starts the entire Attract–Engage–Convert chain.

Visibility equals viability. Alvear’s fifth principle targets the invisible battlefield of Amazon’s search engine. He calls it the place where careers are made or buried. Unless you master keywords, categories, and competitive associations, your book will be exiled to page forty of seclusion. This chapter reads like an SEO manual adapted for creative writers.

How Buyers Find You

Book buyers discover titles through five routes: keyword searches, competitor associations (“Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…”), category browsing, Kindle lists, or direct searches by author or title. The first two methods dominate. If Kindle is a jungle, keywords are your vines. Amazon spiders hunt for exact keyword matches in your title, description, and the seven keyword boxes in your KDP dashboard. If they don’t find them, your book disappears.

Mining Google and Amazon Indicators

Alvear’s process merges Google’s AdWords data with Amazon’s autocomplete “leading indicators.” Start by researching popular search terms on Google—e.g., “flirty text messages” or “infertility treatment.” Then type those phrases into Amazon’s search bar; the dropdown suggestions reveal what real Kindle buyers are looking for. The overlap between Google and Amazon results generates your most profitable keywords. (This dual data method resembles keyword analytics used by professional product marketers.)

Embedding and Ranking

Once you have your list, embed keywords naturally into your book’s title, description, and KDP keyword fields. Consistency signals relevance—Amazon rewards repetition across these areas. Alvear stresses judgment over data obsession. Keywords must fit your book’s content authentically; forcing irrelevant phrases may mislead readers and damage reviews. Fiction writers can even purchase Alvear’s companion guides like How To Sell Fiction On Kindle to get pre-researched keyword lists—proof that mastery can be systematized.

Category Leapfrogging

Finally, he introduces “category leapfrogging”: enter a smaller niche first (like Etiquette instead of Dating), climb into its Top 10, then switch to a larger parent category for higher visibility. This tactical migration mimics startup scaling—dominate a niche before entering the mainstream. The result can lift your book from invisibility to bestseller rankings in weeks. In the digital marketplace, strategic positioning beats luck every time.