Ebooks… Ebook Writing
Ebooks are electronic books, which are generally written with MS Word and then turned into PDFs (Portable Document Files). The reason for the PDF format is because a PDF can be read on virtually any computer, mobile device and ebook reader including most mobile devices.
Before the popularity of ebook readers, championed by Amazon with their Kindle reader, ebooks were a great way of selling information products from your own website or to sell as an affiliate program offering. However, now that Amazon has opened the floodgates to everyone who can now create an ebook and publish it on their Kindle platform, the price of ebooks has nosedived.
That doesn’t mean they have been devalued, it simply means that due to the huge amount of people who can now access and read ebooks, the price has been driven down, whilst demand has notably gone up. This is great news for all budding authors because now there is a supply and demand market that everyone can tap into. Amazon has made it possible for writers and readers to exchange goods for cash right on their own website and they take a percentage of the transactions. It’s what the ebook market really needed.
In the past, when ebooks were merely a device for sharing information, some marketers made real fortunes and although it is less likely to make so much money from selling ebooks from a website these days, there are still fortunes to be made. The $49 ebook of yesterday has become the $4.99 ebook of today, the difference is the potential market audience has grown to huge proportions, and I mean millions! This means that by virtue of numbers you could still make a vast fortune from writing and selling ebooks on Amazon.
The key is to write about what people will find interesting enough to want to buy. If you take a look at Amazon’s best-selling ebook list you’ll get some great ideas about what could potentially make a lot of money. Some self-published authors have literally made millions from selling their ebooks on Kindle, and some books are priced as little as $2.99 each. When you have several books available at the same time and you are able to make hundreds of thousands of sales each month then it doesn’t take long for the cash to start mounting up… fast!
Amazon makes it really easy to self-publish your ebooks on their Kindle platform but one thing that really does need attention to detail is the virtual ebook cover. You know the saying about books and covers and judgement… well it’s all true. So it’s always best to get a professionally created ebook cover to promote your work.
Basically, you have 2 pricing parameter options to work with on Amazon Kindle. The first is to accept 70% royalties from all sales if you comply with Amazon’s terms and conditions, or take 35% royalties if you don’t. In either case, it’s a great deal compared to traditional publishers who pay around 10% royalties. Now here’s an important point about traditional publishers…
If you start to make lots of sales of your ebook on Amazon, then the traditional publishers will come looking for you with a book deal in hand. So making a name for yourself by self-publishing on Amazon is a great way to get a foot in the door with some of the best known offline publishers. That simply means your book… on bookshelves… in bookshops. One problem with traditional publishing and there are many, is that your book will eventually become out of print or if sales drop radically it will be removed from the shelves. The shelf life of a printed book can be quite precarious.
On the other hand, an ebook can stick around for many years bringing in a regular income and providing funding for you to write the next bestseller. It really is a no-brainer. Ebooks are the way to go. So have you got an ebook in you?
Everyone has at least one book in them. Don’t feel like writing it? Can’t write it? No problem… I’ll write it for you. You just provide the information, and I’ll only charge a basic set fee for my time (usually £500). I’ll even format it and upload it to Amazon complete with a professionally designed virtual book cover. And the royalty split?
I’ll settle for just 25% of your 70% royalties. That means if your book is priced at $3.99 you’ll receive $2.79 per sale less my 25% ($0.70), which leaves you with a profit of $2.09 per sale. Make 100,000 sales and you’ll make a total of $209,000, which is over £133,000. Not bad for such a small investment… waiting for your call.
