Books store information in a form we can easily access just by reading. Most of us are bookworms that can’t stay without books, from the good ol’ paperbacks to soft copies, which we refer to as ebooks. Beyond reading, we could earn a side income by selling books.
Did you know that selling books online, even books authored by you, could help you generate passive income? And that passive income earners make more than the average day-to-day worker makes?
Literally, anyone could put together and organize their ideas into a book and just as quickly put it out for sale on the ever-increasing online world, thanks to the internet. You should probably give passive income earning by selling ebooks a second thought. This article will help you get started if you’re up to it.
Is Selling A Book Passive Income?
The answer is an obvious “yes.” You can make passive income from selling ebooks online. The ebook market is just as broad as you can imagine. Everything information is now electronically presented. You’ve probably read several ebooks yourself to learn something new, research a topic of interest, or perhaps treat yourself to some fictitious entertainment.
Creating and selling your ebooks could make you passive income that won’t require your everyday attention and effort to keep rolling in.
How Do I Generate Passive Income From Ebooks?
Having established that selling ebooks online could generate passive income for you, how do you do it?
The whole process is not as complicated as you may think. Here’s how:
Find A Niche
To get started, you’ll need to find a niche for yourself. A cavity is an area of interest you would love to write about. Before choosing a niche, it would be wise to consider places not over-saturated already; this will increase the chances of your ebook generating interest from potential readers. Make sure to think about what people need.
As a rule of thumb, ask yourself if you would be willing to pay for your book yourself. Visiting forums like Quora or Reddit could help you decide what you perceive people need. These present forums with tons of questions that people need answers to. This could serve as a pointer for you.
Being able to find a niche that you’re passionate about and relevant to people should not be taxing after spending some time on these forums. You could also search for trending niches with the help of Google Trends.
Source For Content
You may have to go back to books, traditional paperback books, to get the information you need most of the time. The internet is also a reliable store of information that you can access easily. Plus, there are thousands of PLR articles you can buy and get ideas from.
Remember only to use PLR as a source and not the content. Most PLR contents are plagiarized. When you’re done exploring these options, you might have gotten your eBook ready in your mind.
Create The Content
Now that you’ve figured out what ebook you want to write about, you write. Writing the ebook is my favorite part of the whole process. It’s where you’ll put your creativity to work. Good content is everything, so it has to be good if you’re writing an ebook.
If you’re writing a storybook, you’ll use your imagination. How-tos are not written like stories, you’d explain each topic like a professional in the field, but in a way, your readers will understand. The same thing goes for manuals. You want to get it right with the content, so if writing isn’t your thing, you can hire freelance writers to get the job done.
Put Your Ebook Together
You can do this for free or at a minimal cost. Creating your ebook is both easy as well as time and cost-efficient. With resources like Google sheets, Canva and Unsplash, you can put together your ebook without much effort.
However, much of your work should go into presenting your book so that it is as attractive as possible. This would entice all potential customers.
A shabby cover page could make you lose sales. For this reason, you should endeavor to make your book cover and title as attractive and compelling as possible.us
Market And Sell Your Ebook Online
This is the last part, sales. Marketing is a top-ranking necessity if you ever make any sales. If you already have a ready and waiting audience, getting your book out there should not be so much a problem. However, if you don’t, the next part of this article will show you how to sell your ebook.
What Is The Most Profitable Way To Sell Ebooks Online
There are tons of books available online on various topics and under every niche. So just adding to the ever-increasing volume of ebooks is not a guarantee that you’ll make money without putting in the effort. Here are marketing strategies to help sell your ebook:
Sell It On Your Website
You can sell your ebook directly on your website or blog. Since you already have traffic there, the next thing is to offer them ebooks for a fee. To make the payment process more manageable, include a PayPal link so that they pay, get a download link and get the ebook.
The good side to this is that you control the entire process, and you can save your client’s information via email. You can keep selling to them if you build an email list with them.
Sell It On Third-Party Sites
Amazon is a fantastic platform for you to sell your eBook. There are about 151.9 million Amazon prime accounts; imagine if a tiny portion of those people bought your ebook. You could make actual sales. Amazon charges a commission for each sale, but it’s worth it.
Create An Affiliate Offer For Your Ebook
You need affiliates if you’re selling books on your site or blog. Platforms like Teachable and SendOwl allow you to work with affiliates in selling your products. This way, bloggers and influencers get to promote your ebook for a percentage of the sales made. With this, the probability of you making sales skyrockets exponentially as these influencers market for you.
This strategy is fantastic since it doesn’t demand that you pay upfront. Sales are generated via their affiliate links. Visit platforms like SendOwl, Thrive cart, or Sam cart. They will prove invaluable to you in tracking affiliate sales. Set up your affiliate program easily with any of these platforms, then invite affiliates (bloggers and influencers) in your niche to join you.
How Do Free Ebooks Make Money?
Although it sounds too good to be true, it is. You could make money from literally giving out your books at no cost. Besides being an excellent way to build a name for yourself, direct traffic to your site or blog, and promote your books, free ebooks could be the game-changer to earning more.
There are quite a several ways that free ebooks could make you money. Here are some:
Lead Generation
Giving away your ebook at no cost is creating awareness about yourself. There are still several other ways to develop that would cost you. Building your reputation in the minds of those who will most likely come to like you and your work and become loyal customers is most easily done this way.
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited And Amazon Prime
Your complimentary ebook can make you direct cash, thanks to Amazon. Enrolling your ebook in Amazon’s KDP select program or being an Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited member entitles you to be paid even for your free ebooks whenever someone reads them. Amazon pays you.
Most authors earn anywhere from $1 to $2 whenever their books get read. It may not sound so impressive, but this could run into amounts beyond what you expect if your free ebook becomes popular- which is possible since free and exciting is an irresistible combo.
Easy Marketing And Exposure
Many websites will very willingly promote your ebook at no cost. This even becomes a lot easier with the free ebook strategy since it is way easier to convince people to try out a free offer instead of one that has to be paid for. This makes the promotional efforts of such sites way more accessible. And for sure, with this, your work and you will be getting more exposure.
Building Social Followership And Your Email List
Giving out your ebook for free can secure your social followership and is one strategy you can leverage to build up your emailing list quickly. Typically one out of ten persons that download your ebook will subscribe to your email newsletters. This is good potential for future sales.
Sales Of Products Or Services
Persons who find your book valuable to them will most likely want to learn more from you. Presenting information regarding what other products or services you have for sale in your ebook (preferably at the back of your book) will make you money.
Affiliate Marketing
There are tons of affiliate programs available for products and services. These programs offer a percentage for every sale of their product generated from your affiliate link. Find those affiliate programs related to your niche- related to the content in your book- and get registered with them. You can include your affiliate links in your ebook and recommend these products to your readers.
Social Proof From Book Reviews
When it comes to making a profit from your books, followership is something you don’t want to underestimate. And the social proof will just set off a chain of reactions that will bring you the followership you need. For this reason, you will need just as many reviews on your book as you can get.
However, since access to your book is not restricted when you give it out for free, you could get more readers and reviews faster. Reviews are social proof that your book is worth engaging with. And when it comes to whatever niche you are writing about, persons new to your readers will most likely be bought over by this social proof. In essence, if most persons say your work is lit, then it most likely is. Reviews will make you money again and again in the long run.
Long Term Followership
You’re building for the long term when looking at the bigger picture. Not all readers will earn you income in the present, but you’ll gain loyal followers owing to the impact of your book- persons that will be following you for life. In good time, this will be paying you more than you would have thought. Why not play the part of the patient dog that gets the fattest bone then? It’s worth it.
How Much Can You Make Selling Ebooks On Amazon?
Amazon has made the publishing of books hassle-free. With the help of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), self-publishing one’s book is possible. Amazon offers two royalty rates for self-published books on Amazon.
For readers whose prices are worth more than $2.99, the royalty rate is 70%. For any price less than this, the royalty rate is 35%. Several factors determine whether or not a book will be eligible for either of the royalty options. Kindle pays based on the royalty option that applies to your published book.
The amount of money you could earn selling your ebook on Amazon is dependent on several factors defined by Amazon. Some of these factors include the number of books you publish, the availability of your book in multiple formats, and your marketing ability.
When selling ebooks on Amazon, it’s best to write a series, as having more books increases the chances of your book being displayed up on the search results list and getting read. This is due to how the Amazon algorithm is structured. Also, offering your ebook in multiple formats such as hardback, audiobook and paperback is a plus.
Can You Make Money Publishing An Ebook?
The ebook market had a global net worth of about $18.13 billion as of 2020. This could only imply plenty of room for you to garner reasonable income in this space. There are hundreds of platforms online where you can publish your ebook for free. Some viral platforms for this are Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Barnes & Noble.
The Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) makes publishing and selling your ebook easy and at no cost to you.
Anyone can publish and sell books on Amazon, so it is possible to earn a fortune publishing books, especially on Amazon.
All this is possible with a good strategy and positioned adequately for what sells. It is noteworthy to take into cognizance how the Amazon algorithm works. However, the amount you could make is mainly dependent on what royalty rate you are paid and the volume of sales made. For the latter reason, you want to be sure you are in the preferred price range for which KDP pays 70% royalty.
How Much Can You Make From Selling Ebooks?
There is no limit to the amount of money you can make from selling ebooks online. This is because the online community is so large, and you could sell to as many people as you choose to buy. There is no limit to what you can earn from selling ebooks online.
The significant factors that determine the profits you end up making are your strategy, content quality, and marketing skills. With all these properly considered and some work on your part, you will be sure of mopping in passive income that could continue streaming for years to come.
Tricks To Increase Sales Of Your Ebook
If you’re an aspiring writer or an experienced, published author, you already know that self-publishing is one of the most popular alternative publishing models. The benefits of self-publishing are numerous, but there are a lot of details involved in putting together professionally designed ebooks and selling them to as many people as possible.
We’ve put together a handy guide to help you get as many customers as possible, even if it’s your first time trying out this business model. Here are some of the tactics you can use to sell more ebooks right now.
Content Marketing
Regardless of where you choose to sell your ebook, one thing is sure; you will need to drive traffic to that location to generate sales. A straightforward way to achieve this is content marketing. You’ll use the content on your blog and youtube videos to market content surrounding the topic of your ebook.
A good strategy is to do so before launching your ebook. It is most likely that persons who have found their way to your blog posts and who have found them engaging will want more of what you offer. Your posts should give them a sneak peek of what’s in the ebook.
Q And A Method
Another content marketing strategy is the question and answer method. If you are going to get results, then your content should provide answers to questions in the minds of your readers. Regardless of what niche your content falls under, your reader will have some “how-to” questions regarding the topics in that niche.
Your blog posts content should focus on these questions and should be spewed out in bits. The idea here is to gradually build your audience’s craving for your ebook. These blog posts should gradually build up to your ebook launch and should lure your readers to the pleasure of having all those resources in one place and very portably presented-which is what your book offers.
You can get a good idea of question searches frequently made on Google by simply typing in any questions related to your ebook. This will Google display a listing of other questions frequently asked around that topic. With this, you can decide what the subject of your series of blog posts will be and begin dropping them in spurts.
This will not only pull traffic to your blog posts but also your ebooks. You could move further to make use of keyword search tools. The great thing about this is that people constantly searching for answers to these questions on Google will come across the contents of your blog posts – that could only mean more potential sales.
Build An Audience And Deliver Value To Your Target Audience
If you already have good followership on social media (Instagram or Youtube), then it would be wise that your ebook should revolve around whatever content it is that your audience knows you for.
If you don’t have a ready audience already, then you could join groups on Facebook and make posts on your ebook idea. The responses you get from these groups, if encouraging, could well set out such groups as your target audience for a start.
Building an audience is just a minor half of the whole game of getting your book out there. Building an audience should be to render value by presenting core and relevant content. It is best to write very knowledgeably and with depth on whatever you choose.
For this reason, you should endeavor to deepen your depth of understanding of whatever it is your book is about. You want your book to prove beneficial to your readers. Your readers should get authentic information from you. If possible, lead forged from the fires of your own unique experience and perspective.
This uniqueness will stand your content out. Besides, our identity makes us different, and this difference makes any work worth appreciating. In essence, present quality and unique content to your readers. Treat them to a table of servings so unique that they know they won’t get elsewhere.
The books you read every day can make you a lot of money, and it isn’t limited to what you can earn with the information they provide. You get ideas from books; the option of turning those ideas into an ebook is entirely up to you.
Selling ebooks is a good source of income that can help fund your dreams. Or maybe you dream of becoming a bestseller author someday; you can start by writing and selling ebooks online, and who knows, your dreams could come true. Whatever the case is, this article gives you all the preparation you need to succeed.
