If you’ve been following a marketer by the name of Stefan James, you will find that he has a lot of training programs. One of them teaches about selling your own books through Kindle and I had the opportunity to review the course recently. Is K Money Mastery a scam? We shall soon find out.
What Is K Money Mastery? My Personal Experience
According to the sales offer, K Money Mastery is a basic training program that aims to walk you through the process of creating eBooks and selling them on Kindle. This is a 2.0 version that covers a total of 21 lessons with bits of bonuses here and there. The initial cost for joining is $97.
The idea that Stephen is trying to sell here is that you can generate passive recurring income if you master the system. What’s more, you actually don’t need any experience to get started or even write the book yourself.
Sounds like one of those high-promising make-money-online programs, isn’t it? I see a lot of these with Clickbank products so I didn’t take those claims too seriously. You shouldn’t too because there’s usually more stuff that will take you by surprise.
I signed up anyway to see what’s inside and true enough, the lessons are all there.
In fact, they even come with videos and downloadable summary notes. The topics that you can expect to learn in this rather elaborate course are;
- Finding a profitable niche
- Keyword research
- Creating a title that sells
- Design a cover that sells
- Kindle book creation
- Preparing your book for publishing
- Creating a KDP account
- Publishing your book on Kindle
- Viewing your kindle book
- Getting Amazon reviews
- Marketing your book on KDP select
- Using Twitter & Facebook to promote your book
- Additional book promotion strategies
- Boosting your Amazon keyword rankings
- Setting up your Amazon Author Central Account
- Monetizing your Kindle book
- Creating a series of books & Monetize the back-end
- Dealing with negative reviews
- Scaling up Your Kindle book and making more money
- How to make your books profitable long-term
- How to track, manage and optimize your kindle books
To be quite frank, I wasn’t expecting the course to be so detailed, but it was and I was quite impressed by the amount of work Stephen has put into this course. As a newbie myself, I actually learned a thing or two about Kindle publishing.
Is K Money Mastery a Scam? Not Quite, But…
After spending a few days on the course, I wouldn’t exactly call it a scam because Stephen is basically teaching you how to capitalize on the Kindle readership which is still quite a big market in the Amazon marketplace.
This is a legit way of making money with digital products and many people are successful with it. Look at some of the top-selling authors on Kindle and you’ll know what I mean. It’s not a get rich quick kind of tactic for sure.
But I still harbor doubts on the effectiveness of the training due to these reasons;
- A lot of resources he provides are either out-dated, unsecured sites or cheap services that don’t really compliment for good quality work.
- I checked him on Amazon Kindle and surprisingly, he doesn’t publish a lot of books so it makes me wondered how he actually builds his so-called book business empire. What struck me was the comments saying that he plagiarized another author’s content as his own. Is that what you will turn out to become after following his training?! Copying other people’s content? That’s something serious to think about.
- It seems that Stephan is more interested in getting you to buy other products to scale this book business. Some are software from other people, but most are his personal in-depth training reserved only for those who are willing to pay.
I said this because when signing up for the K Money Mastery, I was offered a $7 1 week trial so that got me hooked. But later, I was bombarded with three upsells – all shiny objects and promises that claim will make you even more successful than just learning from the basic course.
The first is called the ‘Full Disclosure Membership’ that is priced at $47. Apparently, this contains more advanced training and gives you access to the VIP group.
The second upsell took me to The Kindle Virtual Assistant Training Program, priced at $197.
This program basically teaches how to outsource your business to virtual assistants.
The third is another ‘comprehensive’ training program, priced at $17 that aims to show you how to write a book in less than 24 hours.
You see, didn’t I say programs like these will take you by surprise? If you’ve signed up for everything, you actually ended up paying $358 in total instead of $97!!! If you are really going to pay that much amount, you also need to make sure the value of the product justifies the price, which brings us back to point one and two.
My Verdict – And Some Serious Questions to Ask Yourself
Overall, the K Money Mastery is a decent course for beginners with a slightly steep price in my opinion. Stephen does have some experience in the field, but I believe you can learn a lot of these basics for free online if you are willing to do some research.
Others who have had more success with Kindle have come up with courses of their own and I think those are the kind of people you want to learn from. Yes, the cost of their programs are a lot pricier but the fact that they actually walk the talk shows that their teaching could be more effective.
Here are some of the professional instructors you should check out;
- Self-Publishing School by Chandler Bolt – Chandler, also a best selling author, will teach you How To Write & Launch Your Book To $10,000 In 90 Days.
- Self-Publishing Formula by Mark Dawson – Mark is one of the best selling authors on Kindle, with 20 over books and 2 million downloads. His course is suitable for beginner to intermediate levels, fiction, and non-fiction writer.
- Your First 10K Readers by Nick Stephenson – Free Training available
- Authority Pub Academy by Steve Scott and Barrie Davenport.
Having read to this point, the most important question to ask yourself is this – is Kindle publishing right for you? From the outline of the basic course, it should be clear to you that this comes with a lot of work.
- Do you like writing a book?
- Are you ready to commit to the various stages of book production and marketing?
- Are you willing to invest in tools/software or outsource the tasks to someone else?
If your answers are mostly yes (with huge doses of determination), then go ahead and explore this publishing idea and see how you can grow it into a business. But if your answers are mostly no, then don’t waste your time (or money) in any of these courses.
Maybe you like to read but aren’t interested in the book creation side of things. Well, if that’s the case, you can do affiliate marketing instead. It lets you do two things to capitalize on the Kindle market through blogging and you can promote book titles as well as the device.
Say you’re in the parenting niche and found a few book titles you personally like. You can recommend these as reading resources for your audience. If you’re in the book niche, you can write reviews about Kindles and help your readers decide on the right purchase. Either way, you’ll make 4% in sales commissions when promoting any of the categories.
Affiliate marketing is much easier to begin with as an online business because you can leverage pre-existing products on Amazon and start making sales. All you need is just a website, a domain and you’re pretty much good to go. If you like to learn more about this, just sign up for free training at my recommended platform and I’ll walk you through the basics.
I hope you’ve found this review to be insightful. Let me know if you’ve any comments down below.
To launch an eBook into the Kindle market, I think it makes sense to take instruction from popular eBook sellers, rather than taking advice from someone who only sold a few books or plagiarizes another people’s hard work. That last one leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I came across this article after getting the idea of writing a book myself. I have a friend who spends his mornings working on his eBooks and thought it would be a good idea to challenge myself with a similar project.
Based on your review, the K Money Mastery program doesn’t seem like a good fit for my training, but I also realized that getting into good quality training can be a pricey business, which means I need to start saving some money. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. It’s been helpful.
You’re welcome Edgar. Wish you much success in your eBook venture.
My sister who is retired likes to read and is a big fan of Kindle. She’s been thinking of writing an eBook to start a new business and came across the K Money Mastery program on Facebook. Even though you said it is not a scam, I don’t like the upsells, the outdated training and the fact that Stefan James is accused of plagiarizing content.
These are red flags of poor quality training and I think I would get her to check your other recommended sites for starting a Kindle business. Thanks for that.
No problem. Glad to have helped.
Is the $47 membership fee charged on a monthly basis after the trial? That’s quite a lot of money for us here in Asia and I think it should be spent only on training sites that offer more comprehensive value. Personally, I won’t spend that kind of money on a substandard program that teaches outdated techniques. If you stay there for a year, that would be a whopping $564.
The $47 fee is charged monthly and it’s for the membership program (basically a Facebook private group) that Stefan is upselling apart from the K Money Mastery. Whatever the fee, training that focuses on Kindle Publishing should be able to teach you how to sell a book successfully. If it fails to achieve that objective, then it’s best to move to another platform, even if it means paying for more professional training.