How a master's-degree economist bartended at night to fund a $96K KDP publishing business, then quit to scale to six figures on Amazon in under a year.
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A master's-degree economist bartends at night to fund a publishing business, then quits his day job in nine months with nearly $100K in royalties. This is the story of how Ricard built a six-figure Amazon KDP empire by asking one question: what does the market actually want?
Ricard had the résumé most people dream of: an economics degree, a master's in investment strategy, and a corporate career on track. The problem was simple and suffocating. Eight to ten hours a day in an office didn't fit the life he wanted to build.
He tried Amazon FBA first. The numbers worked—$10,000 in revenue, $3,000 in profit per month—but scaling demanded capital and logistics he couldn't manage. When the opportunity came to relocate to Australia for a fresh start, Ricard dropped FBA entirely.
What he discovered next would change everything.
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) isn't glamorous. There are no flashy YouTube millionaires selling KDP courses every five seconds. That was exactly why Ricard saw the opportunity.
KDP offered what Amazon FBA couldn't: low barrier to entry, zero inventory, and a focus on what actually moves numbers—growth and marketing. No warehouses. No shipping delays. Just books, readers, and data.
From day one, Ricard set one non-negotiable goal: make publishing his primary income, not a side hustle.
So Ricard did what few people with a master's degree in investment strategy are willing to do. He bartended at night.
While other publishers treated KDP as a weekend project, he was building a real business. He poured bar earnings into Amazon Advertising, market research, and content creation. By month eight, the numbers vindicated his bet: $96,000 in total royalties.
By month nine, he quit bartending. He was publishing full-time.
Ricard's approach to his first launch—which hit the shelves in late November—wasn't to do something new. It was to do something better.
He studied the top competitor in his chosen niche: health and wellness on Amazon. A massive, competitive market that most publishers assume is impossible to enter. Ricard saw it differently. The market was large, the quality was low. Gap identified.
His first book launched with a singular mission: beat every competitor on every dimension. Better cover design. Better content. Better reviews. Better layout. Within 2–3 days, sales started coming in. They didn't stop.
"The important thing is to create a book that in six months is going to be selling, or even in a year, or even in two years. That's only possible if you create high-quality books."
Ricard doesn't create a book and hope someone buys it. He reverses the logic.
First: What are people searching for? What problems are they trying to solve? What gaps exist? Only then does he build the product.
He uses AI to compress what used to take two weeks of research into minutes—analyzing Amazon reviews, scanning Reddit threads, monitoring social media trends. But here's what separates his approach: he knows AI is a tool, not a replacement.
"You have to edit it. You have to check it. You have to do a proper layout and quality check."
The goal isn't to publish faster. It's to publish better.
"In the first months, you have to reinvest almost everything. That's the only way to grow as fast as I did."
This isn't a platitude. His business is structured around it. When he started, 80% of his budget went to book creation. Now, with AI reducing production costs dramatically, that percentage has inverted toward advertising.
Ricard isn't sitting on his success. He's testing IngramSpark for wider distribution beyond Amazon. He's looking at Audible ACX to convert books into audiobooks. He's monitoring TikTok Shop for direct sales, banking on what he calls the "spillover effect": when one creator sells successfully in a niche, traffic and visibility lift all similar titles.
The vision extends beyond business. A return to Spain to reconnect with family, then a move to a new country. He's not building this to stay in one place.