Kindle Publishing: How To Hire Your First Kindle Virtual Assistant

In this article, I’m going to go into how to hire your first Virtual Assistant for your Kindle Publishing business. If you have any questions please leave me a comment at the end of the post.

What Is A Virtual Assistant?

A Virtual Assistant (often abbreviated to VA) is an office administration professional that works from the comfort of their own home office or a leased office space or anywhere they want to be! They are generally sole traders, carrying their own ABN and working the hours of their choosing.

For the purpose of Kindle Publishing, a VA can:

• Gather reviews for your books.
• Post your books to free promo Facebook Groups.
• Upload your books to Amazon KDP.
• Design your Kindle book covers.
• Format your book for Kindle and Createspace.
• Resize your cover for ACX.
• And pretty much anything you can think of.

How Can A Virtual Assistant Help You Grow Your Kindle Publishing Business?

The most valuable commodity we all have is time. It’s more valuable than money. You can grow a business to make more money but you can’t earn more time. You need to realise how much your time is worth. Most of us get about 70 years if we are lucky, that’s it. What if I told you that an asteroid was going to hit the earth (like in the movies Deep Impact & Armageddon)  in 5 years time how would your life change? I bet you would cherish your time more and stop doing the pointless tasks you do to save money and start doing more of the things that you wanted to do.

I know people who spend hours every week going to different supermarkets looking for deals on food. They will spend 3 hours every Saturday going to 4 or 5 supermarkets looking for cheap food. 3 hours of your life to save $10! If you pay yourself the hourly wage of $10 per hour you may have saved $10 on food you are actually $20 in the hole because you could have spent those three hours working on your business / at your day job earning money. But most people do not think like that. That is the problem.

I went off on a bit of a tangent then but hopefully you can see the point I was trying to make. Your time is valuable and you will make more money in the long run by freelancing out the pointless tasks you don’t want to do to a Virtual Assistant. Again most people think that by doing everything themselves they will make more money. But they won’t. In the beginning, it is good to do everything yourself, because you will learn how everything needs to be done. But after publishing your first couple of books you want to start handing tasks off to a VA.

Like I said before your most valuable commodity is time. So why would you spend it designing your own book covers? But I know people who do that even though they aren’t graphic designers and have no experience in graphic design. I was a graphic designer (and web designer) for 10 years and I don’t even design my own book covers. All that to save $5, it really blows my mind! I get excited when I type in a keyword and I can see the person who has the number 1 result that has clearly designed their own cover (you can tell). I know that if I get a professional cover designed I can be at number 2 and still sell more books than number 1 because my cover is more professional looking, and as a result, my book will look more authoritative.

A VA can do the repetitive tasks you hate doing such as gathering reviews, so you can free up your time to do more important tasks such as Keyword Research, tasks that in the long run will grow your income.

Where Is The Best Place To Hire A Virtual Assistant?

By far the best place to hire a Virtual Assistant is Upwork.com. Upwork is the new name for Elance and Odesk after they were merged in 2015.

From the site: Find freelancers and freelance jobs on Upwork – the world’s largest online workplace where savvy businesses and professional freelancers go to work!

Personally, I preferred using Elance, there is a lot of features that were in Elance that are not in Upwork but it is still the best place to find freelancers online (as well as Fiverr.com).

What A Good Job Posting Looks Like

Here is what a good job post for a Kindle VA looks like. You need to make sure you do not mention paid reviews swaps in the posting or Upwork may delete it.

Kindle Publishing Virtual Assistant

Hi, I run a small online publishing company. I’m looking for someone to help me with promoting my books.

I would like to hire someone who is already experienced in this field of work.

I look forward to hearing from you and hopefully working with you in future 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Also, you will want to ask what experience the Virtual Assistant has had in the past with Kindle Publishing. So you will want to add a screening question such as:

1. How long have you been doing Kindle Publishing Book Promotion? And what have you done? e.g , R.Swaps, Facebook Group Promotion, etc

R.Swaps is shorthand for review swaps as Upwork do not like you talking about doing paid review swaps.

How Much Should You Pay Your Virtual Assistant?

Depending on the task and the VA’s level of experience this will differ. For example, review exchanges / review swaps the going rate at the time of writing is anywhere between $1 and $2 per review. This does not include the $0.99 cost of the book if you are doing paid review swaps (and not review swaps while the book is on free promo).

Formatting your books for Kindle or Createspace will probably cost you $5-$6.

Designing your book cover will cost between $5-$10 on Fiverr.com.

Most other tasks will be anywhere between $1-$6 per task/hour.

Who To Hire?

I tend to only hire people from the Philippines to be my Virtual Assistants. The reason for this is because they all speak fluent English. This is due to the American influence on the country.

The US introduced a free education system and even sent teachers from America to help spread the language and made all teachers speak English in school. This has had a significant impact as even today, most Filipino teachers would speak half English and half Filipino to their students.

Plus a lot of the channels on TV are completely in American English.

Also and more importantly, every VA I’ve worked with from the Philippines has always been extremely friendly and nice, as well as being hard working. This is a personal preference,  feel free to hire whoever you feel will do the best job.

Try Fiverr.com To Get Started

If you are worried about hiring a VA right now why not try hiring one on Fiverr.com instead for smaller tasks such as formatting your book or designing a cover. This is a great way to get into working with VA’s for one-off tasks. There are thousands of Freelancers (VAs) from all over the world on that site that are willing to do pretty much anything you can think of.

Conclusion

I believe the best thing I ever did for my business was hiring my first VA. It freed up so much of my time to spend doing other things related to my business that my income doubled over the next 2 months. If I could go back in time I would have done it sooner.

If you take nothing else away from this article take away these two points:

1. You can’t scale up doing everything yourself, and even if you could you’d be working 80 hours per week.
2. Stop wasting time doing repetitive tasks like designing your book covers that you could pay someone else to do for $5. Your time is important.