Making Money By Writing and Selling eBooks

A writer can earn by working on a publication, magazine, freelance writing, etc. In my experience, publishing ebooks and paperbacks is the best way for writers to make money, and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is the best platform for it. First of all, it is a passive income method, meaning you earn without actively working. Second, there's no limit to how much you can make, you will be earning as long as your books and ebooks are selling. The key to selling books is marketing. Freelancing and working for publication or magazine can also make money, but it's active income, and there's a limit to how much you can earn.

Publishing books and ebooks is completely passive income and it is the best passive income for writers. You will have to spend a long time to write the book, you will also have to spend some money to hire editor and also market and promote your books. Once your book manages to reach the target market, you will start generating sales, However, road to passive income as a book writer is not easy. Blogging is also very good passive income provided you have SEO and digital marketing skill.

Selling Ebooks: Choosing the Right Platform

When it comes to selling ebooks, Amazon's vast market makes it an attractive platform. Amazon also offer better royalties and it is a free platform. However, Amazon’s vast market also poses a potential risk that is the highly competitive market. Therefore, you can also explore other platforms. Etsy can be suitable for specific types of books like workbooks or mini-tutorials. Etsy is a marketplace for digital products as well as physical products. Since ebooks qualify as a digital product, you can sell ebooks on etsy. However, etsy is not a proper marketplace for selling books. Unlike Amazon where you can sell all sorts of ebooks, Etsy is more suitable for tutorials, mini guidess, workbooks, digital planner, journals etc. If you create ebooks in these categories you can use etsy to sell your ebooks. You will have to rank on etsy searches to sell your ebooks.

Likewisew, gumroad is appropriate for selling tutorial and mini guides. You can also try markets like Barnes and Nobles and Lulu. To succeed, write a quality ebook, hire a professional editor and designer, and then upload it to the chosen platform.

If you want to self-publish paperbacks and ebooks, Amazon is not the only platform. There are numerous platforms where you can publish books and ebooks, for example, barnes and nobles, smashwords, etc. However, Amazon happens to be one of the most desired platforms for self-publishing because it is not only the world's biggest eCommerce marketplace but also offers better commissions. If you publish an ebook on amazon and price your ebook at least $2.99 you can earn as much as 70 percent commission. This is the highest commission you can receive for your self-published ebook on any platform. However, it is not easy to sell books through Amazon because it is a highly competitive market. If you want to sell books and ebooks, you need to write and publish in a micro niche. Micro niche is the niche that caters to specific people interested in specific topics. You might also have to publish a lot of books.

Amazon allows you to publish and sell ebooks and make money for free. However, just because there is a platform to sell ebooks and just because you can write does not mean you can actually make money. You can make money from an ebook, paperback, or audiobook, only when you are able to sell books. Amazon doesn't pay authors just for putting their books up. They only pay when someone buys your book.A lot of books are published daily and your book could easily get lost unless you do some marketing and SEO. You need to try multiple free and paid marketing methods to sell ebooks.

Let me ask you a simple question, do you buy a book from unknown author that has zero review or do you by if there are positive reviews? Well, I know what your answer would be. If you are trying to sell your ebooks, you should also get a lot of positive reviews so that your chance of selling increases. How do you do that? Well, you can hire book reviewers on websites like Fiverr or Upwork. However, you need to make sure that your reviewers do genuine reviews that can establish trust in customers. If you get a decent number of reviews, you will also start getting some sales.

What Type of eBook You Can Create?

eBooks are one of the high selling digital products. eBooks are also one of the best ways to build passive income. However, not many people are using this method to make money because they don’t know how to create ebooks.

You can create different types of ebooks

Fictions or non-fictions having hundreds of pages: You will have to do a lot of writing. If you have already written a lot of things (online articles, for example), you can even compile your written works as an ebook.

Medium length tutorials, instructions ebooks such as cook book, gardening book, etc. having 30-40 pages: You will still need to write these books but you will have to add  lot of images, graphics to make these books interesting and instructional. Apart from writing, you also need book designing skills.

Short books such workbooks, guide book, motivation books having 5-10 pages: You need graphic designing skills to create these ebooks. You don’t have to do a lot of writing for these books.

Make Money From eBooks Without Writing eBooks

There are multiple ways to make money with eBooks and some of these methods do not even require you to write ebooks, for instance:

Hire someone through Upwork or Fiverr to write ebook for you, publish this ebook on your own name and earn royalties.

Buy Private Label Rights ebooks and resell these ebooks to make money.

By White Label Rights ebooks, use your name on these ebooks and  these ebooks to make money.

Publishing an eBook

If you ask me what the best way to make money from ebooks without writing yourself is, I would say hiring someone to write for you. You will not only get original book, but even high quality ebook on your chosen topic. You can publish this ebook on platforms like KDP, Barnes and Nobels, Lulu, etc. These are some of the best platforms to publish ebooks, they have a lot of registered buyers and by publishing on these platforms you will make money every time people buy your book. If you are not a writer, there is nothing to worry, you can hire someone to write the book for you. Here is a breakdown of the process.

1. Find a topic that isn't already flooded with books and is also a popular search topic on search engines and online book strores.

2. Post a job on Upwork or buy a gig on Fiverr and pay someone to write about that topic.

3. Get an editor (you can find them on freelancing platforms) to make sure the book looks good.

4. Get a designer to create an attractive cover (you can find them on Fiverr and Upwork)

5. Publish it on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, or Lulu.

Selling an ebook

Publishing is just 10 percent of work, selling and making money is remaining 90 percent work. You can make money, when you actually sell your books. Here is a method you can use.

Go to Upwork and post a job for book reviewers. Hire at least 20 people to review your ebook. Ask them to give authentic reviews. You can also buy gigs on Fiverr but hiring people in bulk works better with Upwork. Get people to talk about your book. More reviews mean more sales.

Also, run an advertising campaign for your ebool. You can use Facebook ads but I recommend running advertising program on the platform where you have published your ebook.

Can You Actually Make Money From eBooks?

Writing and selling ebooks is one of the great ways to make money online, however, making money from ebooks is easier said than done.

First and foremost, it is very competitive because a lot of people are trying to make money by writing and selling ebooks.

Secondly, you will have to work hard to increase your ebooks visibility because of your ebook is not visible to the potential customers, you cannot generate sales. For this, you will have to do SEO and digital marketing.

When people say you can make money from ebooks, are they lying? Well, that’s not the case.

Making money from ebooks is for the experts, people who are expert in writing, designing, digital marketing, and SEO. In order to profit from this niche, you also need to have the ability to do research. Your research should be involved with finding profitable niche with less competition (possibly a micro-niche), finding good topics to write, and find proper keywords for SEO and digital marketing.

Conclusion

If your ebook contain a lot of text, you need to write your book on a word program and the upload the manuscript as word document or PDF on the site where you are publishing your ebook. Text based books need a lot of writing. However, if you are creating books with a lot of images and very few text, Canva can be very useful. Canva offers a lot of templates for ebooks. You can use these templates, add your text and images to these templates and create an ebook

Low content ebooks like workbooks, journals, logbooks, notebooks, even mini tutorials and guidebooks can be easily created through design tool like Canva, you do not have to spend hours writing and designing these products. However, the major problem with these products is there is so much competition. if you check etsy, you will see a lot of people are selling these items and you will have to compete with them.

Depending on the kind of ebook you build, you will have to spend $200-$500 to write, publish, and advertise your ebook. You can easily recover your investment by selling 50-100 ebook