Your Guide on How to Make Money With eBooks

You’ve heard about passive income, and you might be thinking, “what could be better than that?” Put in some work now and continue to reap the financial benefits for weeks, months, and even years to come. While it’s not always as simple as that, writing ebooks is one side hustle you won’t want to disregard: It is relatively simple (though not necessarily easy!).

Although print books are still more popular than their electronic counterparts, it’s more feasible to break into publishing by going the Kindle (or Nook or iBook) route. And now that Amazon is making it easier than ever to publish, printing a physical book is a natural extension of your ebook.

If you’re wondering how to make money with ebooks, this is the step-by-step guide you’ve been searching for. We’re going to discuss how to find a topic for your book, how to write it, how to publish it, and getting the word out.

Now, keep in mind that succeeding with ebooks is at least somewhat a matter of being in the right place at the right time. As Amanda Hocking, one of many self-published authors who has made millions, has said, “As far as I can tell, it was a perfect storm of having the right books in the right genre at the right price at the right time.”

But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to succeed with ebooks.

You can improve your odds of making money with ebooks by having a system of niche and content development, choosing the right platform, making the most of your marketing effort, and, perhaps most important of all, riding the momentum and not sitting back to relax once your first book is published.

WHAT ARE EBOOKS?
EBooks are books that are published online. That’s it.

Think of it like streaming a show on Netflix or buying the digital copy of a movie on Amazon. EBooks are the digital copies of real books. You can read them on your Kindle, laptop, phone, Nook, or whatever that’s connected to the internet.

More ebooks are being published now than ever before. This happens for a couple of reasons:

Authors are finding that they can make more money by self-publishing ebooks. Traditional publishing is slow, difficult, and the commissions are razor thin.

Ebooks are easy to publish and anyone can do it. Anyone can start with an ebook, print paper copies, and record audio versions without leaving the house. The market is wide open.
Both of these points mean that if you’re looking to write a book, you don’t have to wait for the green light from HarperCollins.

You can publish your own book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a hundred other platforms for free.

Yes, you can do this process for free (though I do recommend spending some money on a cover design, and maybe an editor). You can set your own pricing and market it through whatever channels you want.

Most important of all, ebooks allow you to receive monstrous commissions compared to traditional publishing.

So here’s how to write your own ebook and make money.

HOW TO WRITE AN EBOOK AND MAKE MONEY
DEVELOP A NICHE
When you think about Stephen King, you automatically know which niche he has filled. If you’re looking for a horror novel, you might be inclined to specifically seek out one of King’s books. If you wanted to read a historical romance, you would probably do a double-take if you saw his name alongside a depiction of a Fabio-esque gentleman and a swooning maiden wearing hoop skirts.

The King of Horror has developed a place for himself in the publishing world, and you should do the same thing.

WHY A NICHE IS IMPORTANT
One of the main reasons a niche is important is that it makes it easier to establish yourself as an authority on your subject. You probably know a lot about a few topics and a little about hundreds of topics.

Let’s say you’re a nurse who works in a general pediatric office. Some of the topics you likely know a lot about might include what it takes to become a nurse, children’s vaccinations, and common childhood illnesses. You also probably know a little about things like specific heart ailments, bone problems in children, and head trauma.

Could you write an ebook about children’s vaccines? What would make it different from what’s already out there? Plenty of doctors and worried parents have already written books on the topic. This may be an area where people view you as underqualified or unnecessary.

But maybe since you’re a parent in addition to being a nurse, you could write about how you, as a parent, had to weigh the risks and benefits of vaccinations. You could write about how you overcame any fears that you had about vaccines. You can present yourself as an authority on both the nursing angle and the parental angle.

Playing the nursing and parenting example is awesome because it plays to both of your strengths. It is a niche that is yours alone but it still solves two very real needs (health info and parenting info).

After you write this ebook, you could then go on to write additional books on topics where intuition as a parent might or might not align with the usual medical recommendations. Alas, your niche has been born!

When choosing your niche, I recommend going small instead of big. You might could write a whole book on how to be healthy. But there are hundred of well-researched, well-written books on how to be healthy. It is so tough to bring something new to the table. It is easy to get drowned out.

Instead, write for a very target audience. Instead of writing about how to be fit, tell pregnant women on a budget how they can stay in shape. Write about fitness for men in a depression. Compile the ultimate list of staying healthy and exercising with your animals.

None of these books will make it onto the New York Times Bestseller List. But all of them can make you a sustainable, passive income. Spencer (the founder of Niche Pursuits) used this tactic to make over $100 a day for a while selling his niche ebook.

This tactic works with websites and ebooks. But even though smaller is often better, it’s not always better. Here’s why:

DON’T LOCK YOURSELF INTO A BOX
One caveat: Before you think that you need to develop the tightest niche possible, consider the case of Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. Now he’s famous enough that he could write about anything he wanted to, but he started out with the “4-hour” theme. The 4-Hour Workweek. The 4-Hour Chef. The 4-Hour Body.

All of these books are full of self-help ideas and hacks to make your life easier and to spend as little time as possible doing what you need to do to succeed. Tim has written about outsourcing, working out, and cooking… but all of it centers around self-help. Not only that, but all of his books assume that the reader is able to think outside the box and is willing to try new things.

When choosing your niche, narrow is good, but not too narrow. You want to see both the forest and the trees. So decide upon your angle, but don’t be afraid to shift it a bit within the same paradigm, particularly once you have a couple of ebooks under your belt. Remember, the more you write within a particular niche, the more people will perceive you as an expert.

It’s important to ask yourself if you’re answering all of the questions that someone might have. If your reader has to go somewhere else after reading your book, then you didn’t go deep enough.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF AS YOU DEVELOP YOUR NICHE
Developing your niche can look like an enormous undertaking, so you’ll want to ask yourself some questions to help narrow it down. Here are a few to think about:

What are your passions? You might know a lot about engineering or law, but if you aren’t passionate about it, you will probably tire of writing about it. If you could spend a year pursuing any topic you wanted to, what would it be?

Within your passions, what do you already know about, either from studying or from first-hand experience? It’s always easier (and often more enjoyable) to write about what you know.
What group of people do you want to reach? Are you trying to encourage teenagers? Is your dream to become a role model for stay-at-home moms? Do you want to inspire 40-year-olds who are going back to school? Maybe you want to teach senior citizens how to make the latest technology work for them. Are pet-owners your target audience?
If you were going to spend a day teaching someone (for no pay) how to do something, what would you be teaching? Who would your student be? This can give you an idea of who your target market is and what your niche might be.

PACKAGE YOUR CONTENT WELL
It’s the modern era. If you want to know about something, it’s never been easier to use the device in your pocket to Google it. Let’s say you’re going to be writing a book about birds in your state. Why would someone pay to read your ebook rather than simply check out a few ornithological websites?

The truth is, just about anything you write about, outside of fiction, a memoir, or an autobiography, can generally be researched online for free. What is it about the book you’re selling that is going to make people want to purchase it? It’s going to be about the packaging:

How can you package the information so it provides value to your readers? Knowing how to make your fiction or non-fiction book more valuable is what’s going to help you earn money.

SOLVE A PROBLEM FOR YOUR READERS
Let’s say you want to know how to take care of your new puppy. You can Google things like, “how to potty train a puppy,” “how to socialize a puppy,” and “how to get my puppy to stop chewing on my shoes.”

As time goes by, you’ll need to know how to know that you’re feeding your four-legged friend enough, what should prompt a call to the veterinarian, what to do if he won’t walk nicely on a leash, and how to get him crate-trained. While you can certainly spend hours researching all of this information on your own, wouldn’t it be easier to download an ebook that told you what to do, step by step?

This is what you need to keep in mind so you can make money with ebooks. Consider a problem that your reader might be having and create an ebook by putting all of the information together in a way that’s easy to read and simple to follow.

Voila! Even though they can probably get the same information for free online, they can’t do it without a time investment. By putting it all together, you’ve solved their problem without taking up hours of their time.

It’s also worth mentioning that people don’t always value something unless they pay for it. This is one of the great mysteries of humanity and I don’t understand it. But when people pay a few bucks for your ebook, there’s a big chance that they’re gonna read it to the end. That isn’t true about websites.

Even though comparable information is on the web, people often don’t read it. Let’s be real; we’ve compiled a huge list of info about ebooks on Niche Pursuits. Have you read it all?

No! Of course not. But if we charged you $5, you’d want to get your money’s worth.

EBooks are similar.

INVEST IN YOUR ART
You need to spend money to make money, and this is as true with ebook publishing as it is with anything else. One important part of how to make money with ebooks includes investing in your work. Here are some of the services you might want to hire out so you can make your book as professional and purchase-worthy as possible:

Cover art. Forget about trying to doodle or freehand your own cover, and don’t even think about just sticking a solid cover with a Times New Roman title on your book. If you’re not an artist or a photographer, find someone who is to create a great cover for your ebook. Remember, you only get one chance to make a good first impression, and that cover is going to be what your potential readers see first most of the time.

Professional proofreading and editing. Not all great writers are also great editors, and your electronic grammar checker of choice isn’t going to be enough to catch every possible error. Even if you are usually a flawless writer, it’s almost guaranteed that someone else will be able to find awkward wording or places where you’ve used an incorrect phrase.

Formatting help. Depending on which platform you’re using, there will be some differences in the formatting that you use. If you are computer-savvy and you don’t mind following a step-by-step instruction manual when it comes to formatting, then you could save money and do it yourself. If you’re not savvy with Microsoft Word and you really just don’t want to bother, though, it’s better to hire someone to help you out than it is to try to submit in the wrong format and deal with that fiasco.

MAKE MONEY WITH EBOOKS: SELLING EBOOKS ONLINE
KNOW YOUR PLATFORMS
When it comes to actually publishing your ebook, you have quite a few choices as to which platform (or platforms) to use. Here is the lowdown on some of the most popular.

SELF PUBLISH ON AMAZON KINDLE
Kindle Direct Publishing is kind of the holy grail of ebook publishing: It’s not only the most well-known, but an amazing two-thirds of the ebook-purchasing market is held by Amazon. There are quite a few advantages.