The Driven Publishers Podcast

Acutrack prints and ships books for some of the biggest self-publishers selling outside of Amazon, especially on TikTok Shop.

In this interview, Peter sits down with Raj, founder of Acutrack, and Pete, VP of Strategic Initiatives. Acutrack started in a Silicon Valley garage in 1992 shipping software, and today it handles printing, inventory and same-day fulfillment for publishers who sell on TikTok Shop, Shopify, Etsy and their own funnels.

They talk about what separates the publishers who scale from the ones who stall, when it actually makes sense to go beyond Amazon print on demand, how the money math changes when you sell direct, what goes wrong when you do fulfillment from your garage, and why bundles are something KDP simply can't give you.

Full transparency: Acutrack is the printing and fulfillment partner Peter uses himself, and they are a sponsor of the DPE Mastermind in Miami.

Kevin Faggioli has generated more than $2 million through Amazon KDP, sold one of his publishing portfolios for multiple six figures, and had a single month with over $140,000 in profit. A big part of that came from markets most publishers ignore: Europe.

He started in 2019 on amazon.com, fought the competition for two years, then launched the exact same campaign in Italy and saw his ACOS drop to less than half. That was the moment he went all in on the European marketplaces.

In this episode we talk about what publishers leave on the table by ignoring Europe, why translating a book and hoping it sells rarely works, how niches differ between Germany, Italy and Spain, where AI really moves the needle (and where it is overhyped), and his step-by-step workflow for taking a book into a new market.

Results like these are uncommon. Individual results vary, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you will earn.

Eiri is the founder of PublisherChamp, the platform more than 40,000 authors use to see the real numbers behind their publishing business.

He built it seven years ago for his brother-in-law, who kept refreshing the KDP dashboard to see if he had made a sale. Today it pulls royalties and ad spend from 30+ platforms into one place.

In this episode we talk about the numbers every publisher should know every week, why royalties and sales are two different numbers, the books that quietly bleed your account dry while the total still looks positive, what to do when the data says a book is dying, and how you can now ask your own data questions in ChatGPT or Claude.

Mike is 27, lives in Cyprus, and until recently he was a software engineer. He learned about Amazon KDP over coffee from a publisher friend who showed him his real numbers. He published his first three books, got to somewhere between $400 and $500 a month in revenue, and then did the thing most people would call too early: he quit his job to go all in.

We recorded this before knowing where the story ends, on purpose. Mike has 3 books live and 3 more about to launch. If you have ever asked to see someone who is not 10 years into publishing, this is that interview: why he chose publishing over every other business model, what has been harder than he expected, and what he wants to be true 12 months from now.

In this episode:

- Why a software engineer chose Amazon KDP over a "normal" business

- Why he quit his job at $400 to $500 a month in revenue, and how he justifies it

- Peter's six dollars per hour math, and why early KDP hours are worth more than they look

- The trademark check that saved him weeks of wasted ad spend

- Why niche research eats half his time, and the night 20 niches turned into zero

- What "Amazon is testing you" looks like in the first weeks of running ads

- His plan for Q4, and the 12 month goal he set himself (a goal, not a result)

- What DPE London changed about how he sees the business

- What he would say to someone who is hesitant to commit

Figures Mike mentions for the future are goals, not results. Results like these are uncommon. Individual results vary, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you will earn.

A year ago Matthew and his wife were both full-time teachers, twenty years into a career that had ground them down, and his first Amazon KDP book made him about $20 in its first month. He kept going anyway, working forty-plus hours a week on publishing on top of teaching, including twenty hours every weekend. By December he was at 6K net a month, roughly what he earned teaching. By June he hit 11.5K net on 27K gross, enough to cover both salaries. Last month he did $15,050 in net profit and crossed $4,200 in royalties in a single day. This summer he and his wife both left teaching.

In this episode Matthew walks through the whole thing, unglamorous parts included. He explains the Amazon ad cap that was quietly throttling his account at $25 a day and the support conversation that lifted it, what the real economics look like when you spend $15,000 on ads to make $15,000 in profit, why cash flow is his biggest bottleneck, and what changed after he came to the DPE London event and joined the community on day one. He is also open about what he does not know, including the bulk orders he cannot explain and the redundancy package that made the timing work.

In this episode:

- The $25 daily ad cap that was throttling his whole account, and the exact fix

- How he replaced a teaching salary in under nine months while still teaching full-time

- What a $15,050 net profit month really costs in ad spend, tools and agency fees

- Why about 25% of his 20 published books earn most of the money

- His full book process, from scrolling Amazon to validate an idea through to launch ads

- How he uses AI on the parts of the job a machine does better, and where the human has to step back in

- The one-dollar price increase that cost him nothing and may be worth thousands a month

- What changed in his decision making after joining a room of publishers ahead of him

Results like these are uncommon. Individual results vary, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you will earn.

Six months ago Adrian was the $51,000 month. He had sold his first KDP business for $278,000, walked away from publishing, come back, and hit $51K in a single month within seven months. This time he opens the call with a screenshot and a sentence nobody expects: "I realized that my profit per book sadly is going down." August 2026 was $6,000 profit on $15,000 of ad spend, and after fixed costs and reinvestment the money that actually reaches his pocket is closer to $1,000.

It is a plateau, and Adrian is unusually honest about why. He tripled last August's profit, tripled his book portfolio, finally built a team that works, and still says he stagnated. So he is doing two things at once. He has $120,000 in cash from selling real estate pointed straight at Q4 ads, with five books running in his winning series. And he is betting his own hands on a single TikTok Shop book, 2,300 generated images and two and a half weeks of full time work, which so far has produced a handful of organic sales and a $250 ad loss. If it works, he thinks 6K a month becomes 30 or 40.

✅ The real August numbers: $6K profit, $15K spend, and what is left after costs

✅ Why tripling your profit in a year can still feel like standing still

✅ The $120,000 Q4 war chest and what he plans to do with it

✅ Hiring for real: 100 people tested, 30 applicants, 3 okay, 1 good

✅ The Canva test that most applicants fail in under a minute

✅ Quality floor versus quality ceiling, and why raising the floor scales

✅ The Nike style teen interior that made one book work, and what it cost to copy

✅ Why he is moving to TikTok Shop while the advanced publishers are not looking

✅ Six productive hours a day, two naps, and how he knows when to stop

✅ His real bottleneck, and why it is not strategy

If you have been grinding without a breakthrough month, this is the interview to watch.

Results like these are uncommon. Individual results vary, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you will earn.

Charlie Piper started publishing on Amazon KDP at 18, sold multiple publishing accounts for six figures before he turned 23, and came back full-time in 2023 as head coach at Royalty Hero. He has now done over a thousand coaching calls, and he says the thing that separates a student making 5K a month from one making 30K is the keyword, almost never the book. He tells the story of a 6-7 activity book whose interior was no better than anyone else's and that still did roughly a quarter of a million in royalties in a single December, purely because it was the right keyword at the right moment.

In this conversation we go through how he actually picks keywords: the three signals he checks, why competition now matters more than raw demand, and why timing has become the skill that decides everything. He shares the student who sat at 1 to 2K a month for years and then went from 1K to 12K gross in one month on a back-to-school niche, the student who found a cooking trend on Instagram Reels before a single book existed for it, and what he and his partner Jacob are already planning for January 2027.

What You'll Learn In This Episode

✅ The three signals Charlie checks before chasing any keyword

✅ Why competition, not demand, is the metric that decides your ad costs

✅ How to plan and time a release for a season months in advance

✅ What changed in Amazon search now that AI and Rufus exist

✅ Why being first into a niche is risky and when the risk is worth it

✅ How much of ranking is metadata versus cover, title and reviews

✅ The one keyword mistake you can go and fix tonight

✅ Why his best-selling books are in topics he has zero interest in

✅ How keyword research works differently for audiobooks on ACX

✅ What he is bringing to his Keywords Masterclass in Miami

If your books are not showing up on Amazon, the answer is almost always upstream of the book itself. Charlie is running his full Keywords Masterclass live at our Miami event, with a live demo instead of theory.

Results like these are uncommon. Individual results vary, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you will earn.

In early 2025 Gerald and I sat in Peru and decided to take publishing on the road. Barcelona was 30 people in a hotel room. Las Vegas was 100. London was over 120 experienced publishers, some doing more per month than anything we had seen on YouTube. In this session, Gerald and Tim from the Driven Publishers team share what those three events taught us: the stories, the mistakes, and the strategies that were "advanced" two years ago and are table stakes now.

You will see the German market playbook behind every launch we do today, how to find expert Upwork freelancers for any niche, the workflow test Tim runs before outsourcing anything, Gerald's full Amazon ads launch stack, a live Helium 10 walkthrough on Amazon.de, and the lesson every event confirmed: information is online, the people are not. Plus the London recap video and the numbers that silenced a room of 120 publishers.

What You'll Learn In This Episode

✅ How three publishing events grew from 30 to 120 attendees, and why the room matters more than the slides

✅ The German market opportunity: best Amazon ads ROI, low review counts, and the two-books-a-week limit that protects it

✅ Cover styles and fonts that leave money on the table if you only make the standard cover

✅ How to find a marine biologist, a Montessori teacher or a comedy writer on Upwork in a day

✅ The "can my mom do it" workflow test, and why asking why five times fixes broken systems

✅ What Las Vegas taught us about TikTok Shop, hiring funnels and Helium 10

✅ A live Helium 10 Cerebro walkthrough on the German marketplace, and the 6-7 book that went from one review to 900 BSR

✅ Gerald's launch method: 40 to 100 campaigns per book, every ad type, and the video ad that took a book to 8K BSR

✅ How Sachin went from 15K to over 100K net profit a month in a year and a half

✅ The three lessons behind every event: belonging over information, advanced becomes standard, results come from relationships

✅ How Tim learned publishing by editing the courses, and why AI needs humans in the loop

If you are serious about building a real publishing business on Amazon KDP, the fastest shortcut we know is being in a room with people who are already doing it. Miami is November 7 and 8.

Results like these are uncommon. Individual results vary, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you will earn.

Laurenz is 23, from Germany, and published his first book on Amazon KDP in November 2025 while still studying landscape architecture. For the first 4 to 5 months he was stuck at roughly $3,000 a month in revenue and, by his own admission, not profitable. Last month he did around $36,000 in revenue and $18,000 in profit, and he has published a new book every single day for the last three weeks.

In this episode, Peter digs into what actually changed: the "100 shots" volume philosophy that found his winning niche (one title went below BSR 100 in Germany), the publishing cockpit he built with Claude Code so his freelancers work inside his system, the two work blocks that got him through university and KDP at the same time, and why he chose this over joining his father's landscaping company.

What You'll Learn In This Episode:

✅ Why Laurenz was stuck at $3K/month for 5 months (and what was missing)

✅ The "shoot 100 shots" approach that found his winning niche

✅ Why 4 to 5 titles make 80% of his income, and why that's fine for now

✅ How his Claude Code cockpit puts freelancers in the loop without sharing his code

✅ The pipeline: niche research, title surveys, 100 cover variations, outline to A+ to ads

✅ Where a human still has to judge (niche, covers, quality control, final review)

✅ How he publishes one book a day, and whether that's sustainable

✅ His daily routine: sunlight, 100 push-ups, eat the frog, two work blocks

✅ Why he turned down the family business to prove he can build something himself

✅ Advice for publishers stuck at $1K to $3K a month

If you're serious about scaling an Amazon KDP business in 2026, this is what a systems-first publisher looks like at 23: more output, a human in the loop for every judgment call, and the patience to stay in the game until one book takes off.

Andrey Bernhart has made over $600K on Amazon KDP in just over two years, publishing 55+ books. In this solo episode (sitting on the rocks in Cyprus, in tribute to Peter's early "walking videos") he breaks down what actually got him there since first discovering Peter Holmquist and Driven Publishers Elite.

The mindset shift mattered most: why chasing more information stopped being the answer, and why community, experience, and execution took over, plus the concrete lessons on team-building, Amazon ads, and why publishers who share openly grow faster than those who don't.

What You'll Learn In This Episode

✅ Why experience is the bottleneck, not knowledge

✅ How Andrey scaled from working solo to a 3-person team

✅ The "hire 10, keep 2" approach to building a publishing team

✅ Why no two publishers ever build their business the same way

✅ How a failed business before KDP fueled his fast success

✅ What Andrey learned about Amazon ads from Gerald

✅ Why sharing your strategies openly makes everyone grow faster

✅ The real value of DPE's live events and free masterminds

If you're serious about scaling your Amazon KDP business, the takeaway is finding the right people, testing relentlessly, and putting in the work. Andrey's story is proof that execution is what separates six-figure publishers from everyone else.

Results like these are uncommon. Individual results vary, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you will earn.