Ebooks

[Maxboost]

I have been wondering if there is any money left in self published Ebooks. Is it still profitable? Can it be a perpetual income stream? How can you protect your investment from illegal pirating and torrents? Can you provide an app replacement instead?

Does anyone have any good links or resources for marketing?

Thanks everyone for helping me leave the slow lane.

Thanks.

 

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[EricZ]

I have been wondering if there is any money left in self published Ebooks. Is it still profitable? Can it be a perpetual income stream? How can you protect your investment from illegal pirating and torrents? Can you provide an app replacement instead?

Does anyone have any good links or resources for marketing?

Thanks everyone for helping me leave the slow lane.

Thanks.

Yes
Yes (as a matter of fact I think it's the definition of "passive" income, when you get it right)
Don't worry about pirates in the beginning
wtf is an app replacement? Forget that! Why would you waste thousands on apps,developers,nda's, when you can write a fricken book with no overhead?!

Start here:
A kick a$$ crash course
http://7daychalllenge.blogspot.de/

Or right here in this forum:
https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/hello-from-denver-self-publishing-success.46006/

 

[GMSI7D]

I was thinking about writing ebooks but 90 % of books or ebooks don't make any money for 2 reasons :

1) there are too much books available out there, thousands new titles every week
and pareto law says that 20 % of books will make 80 % of the money made in the industry , the other 80 % will make little money if any at all

2) people are used to watch videos and are lazy, less that 10 % of people actually read books on a regular basis.
so when people say that ebooks are part of the future, they don't tell us the whole truth.

The only rational reason to write books is to position yourself as the expert of your market, not to make money. you will make money on the back end with other products once you are trusted by your potential customers

because people automaticaly see you as an expert, a guru , and then the authority principle helps you to get trust from your customers.

By the way, books can be a very good sales letter to convince people to buy products you have made

i am thinking about jeff Walker's book. http://jeffwalker.com/books/

His book make readers want to invest in his business course , product launch formula.
i don't know if this was Jeff Walker's goal in the first place but this is a really good strategy

 

[EricZ]

I was thinking about writing ebooks but 90 % of books or ebooks don't make any money for 2 reasons :

1) there are too much books available out there, thousands new titles every week
and pareto law says that 20 % of books will make 80 % of the money made in the industry , the other 80 % will make little money if any at all

2) people are used to watch videos and are lazy, less that 10 % of people actually read books on a regular basis.
so when people say that ebooks are part of the future, they don't tell us the whole truth.

The only rational reason to write books is to position yourself as the expert of your market, not to make money. you will make money on the back end with other products once you are trusted by your potential customers

because people automaticaly see you as an expert, a guru , and then the authority principle helps you to get trust from your customers.

By the way, books can be a very good sales letter to convince people to buy products you have made

i am thinking about jeff Walker's book. http://jeffwalker.com/books/

His book make readers want to invest in his business course , product launch formula.
i don't know if this was Jeff Walker's goal in the first place but this is a really good strategy

Jeff Walker is the real deal. You should definitely take his free video course - it's his product launch formula in a nutshell, and if you are savvy you can fill in the gaps.

Ebooks are competitive, true, but there are other platforms like createspace.

Steve Scott has some excellent articles about the 4 big categories, check out his blog too!

"The only rational reason"
I disagree with this. There is no such thing as "rational", nobody buys for "rational" reasons, nobody reads for "rational" reasons.
Scott Adams has some great blogs about that too, basically we are all moist robots! LoL if you want to think out of the box, forget "rational". Just look at the elections and Trump vs. Hillary. You will have a happier life if you forget this fallacy called "rational" ;-)

Also, if you want to sell anything, remember it's emotion that rules every decision to buy.

You sure got it right with Pareto, I would even say less than 9% of the books make 80% of the revenues.

Your job is to get into that 9 percent. If you experiment around and stop throwing spaghetti at walls, you can do it.
I'm even making money with my kids books on createspace. Didn't some guru say kids books aren't profitable? Wrooong!

 

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[Harti]

Instead of eBooks, I create video courses.

You can charge drastically more ($997 are not rare for a very in-demand, HQ course) and customers will more likely go through it than a book.

 

[Maxboost]

Yes
Yes (as a matter of fact I think it's the definition of "passive" income, when you get it right)
Don't worry about pirates in the beginning
wtf is an app replacement? Forget that! Why would you waste thousands on apps,developers,nda's, when you can write a fricken book with no overhead?!

Start here:
A kick a$$ crash course
http://7daychalllenge.blogspot.de/

Or right here in this forum:
https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/hello-from-denver-self-publishing-success.46006/

Thanks for the help, I downloaded some books in app format for only 1 dollar. I thought it was a clever way to prevent pirating and torrents.

App development is something that I would like to get into eventually, creating simple apps for exercise. Thanks man and I will definitely check out those links.

 

[Hicks]

.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

I have been wondering if there is any money left in self published Ebooks. Is it still profitable? Can it be a perpetual income stream? How can you protect your investment from illegal pirating and torrents? Can you provide an app replacement instead?

Does anyone have any good links or resources for marketing?

Thanks everyone for helping me leave the slow lane.

Thanks.

hello. It's very difficult to answer this question because obviously it's a massive field. Of course there is demand for books. I think the development over the past few years is that the quality of self pub bed books has to be higher...maybe closer to traditional publishers. There was a trend before of people paying someone 100 dollars to basically write an expanded Wikipedia page and charge 3 dollars for it....that's not really possible anymore. But if you have 'something to say' people will be interested.

As for the passive income thing...well I like to call it 'passive aggressive income'. Basically I worked non stop for 2.5 years and now I can live off the 'passive' income. It didn't feel very passive at the time though!

If you get it right you can also build an audience for other things. For example I've spent 6 months building a membership website connected to my books. I wouldn't have had the freedom to do this without the books and I certainly wouldn't have had the audience.

I hope that helps and please let me know if you need any help. I'm not a regular poster on this forum but I often read it.
Self publishing has been good to me and I hope it is to you too.
Good luck.

 

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[EricZ]

.

[/QUOTE]

hello. It's very difficult to answer this question because obviously it's a massive field. Of course there is demand for books. I think the development over the past few years is that the quality of self pub bed books has to be higher...maybe closer to traditional publishers. There was a trend before of people paying someone 100 dollars to basically write an expanded Wikipedia page and charge 3 dollars for it....that's not really possible anymore. But if you have 'something to say' people will be interested.

As for the passive income thing...well I like to call it 'passive aggressive income'. Basically I worked non stop for 2.5 years and now I can live off the 'passive' income. It didn't feel very passive at the time though!

If you get it right you can also build an audience for other things. For example I've spent 6 months building a membership website connected to my books. I wouldn't have had the freedom to do this without the books and I certainly wouldn't have had the audience.

I hope that helps and please let me know if you need any help. I'm not a regular poster on this forum but I often read it.
Self publishing has been good to me and I hope it is to you too.
Good luck.[/QUOTE]

Definitely interested in ALL of your audience building techniques,
Also 2.5 years is actually darned fast - congratulations!!

Could you give more details about how you built your membership site?

Brgs
Eric

 

[Maxboost]

.

[/QUOTE]

hello. It's very difficult to answer this question because obviously it's a massive field. Of course there is demand for books. I think the development over the past few years is that the quality of self pub bed books has to be higher...maybe closer to traditional publishers. There was a trend before of people paying someone 100 dollars to basically write an expanded Wikipedia page and charge 3 dollars for it....that's not really possible anymore. But if you have 'something to say' people will be interested.

As for the passive income thing...well I like to call it 'passive aggressive income'. Basically I worked non stop for 2.5 years and now I can live off the 'passive' income. It didn't feel very passive at the time though!

If you get it right you can also build an audience for other things. For example I've spent 6 months building a membership website connected to my books. I wouldn't have had the freedom to do this without the books and I certainly wouldn't have had the audience.

I hope that helps and please let me know if you need any help. I'm not a regular poster on this forum but I often read it.
Self publishing has been good to me and I hope it is to you too.
Good luck.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the insights, I really do appreciate it. Do you make any other residual money off of your website? Advertising? other products you sell?

Thanks again

 

[Hicks]

/QUOTE]

Definitely interested in ALL of your audience building techniques,
Also 2.5 years is actually darned fast - congratulations!!



Brgs
Eric[/QUOTE]
@EricZ
Hi there. Checked your website. Really like it.

I'm afraid that it's nothing interesting.

Here is a short list of what worked and what didn't.

Facebook: no good..just time wasters.
Website: ok for list building but no actual book sales i think. though as there was a link back to my amazon page i cant be sure...
Email list: I hate to admit it but i never really emailed them. I will do now that i have a membership site but i didn't send many for my books.

What worked was this:
All for non fiction.
1) I wrote in series of three: each book was between 10000 and 15000 words and then I'd collect them in a single book. This was very very effective, because rather than having just one large book show up in the results i had four. This made me a lot more visible to customers. My competitors sometimes have volume 1-6 all on the same area... that's it. With mine i focused on about 5 areas and had 3 books and a collection in each area. Much more of a blanket.

2) I'm in a niche that makes it easy to have books in different languages. Also it's easier to dominate in foreign markets.

3) I made all of my books into audiobooks. This was by far the best thing i did. I went for the 50/50 split on acx because i wanted to move onto other things but if id produced them on my own this would have been a lot more.

4) I wrote a lot. I think I produced something like 25 books of which about 15 of them are 4 different languages. That's a lot of content.

I'm sure you know most of this but hope that helps. Nothing revolutionary really, just total desperation for it to work lol.

 

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[Hicks]

@EricZ
Hi regarding the membership website.

Ive just finished it so have no idea if it will work. so can't help with how to market it.

But technically speaking:
Membership: I used woocommerce plus their subscriptions and members plugins. There are a lot cheaper and really good membership plugins but i wanted to have both a membership and a ebook shop so woocommerce is great because users can just purchase things from one account and wont have to keep making different accounts for buying different things.
Sales page: For the sales page i used 'thrive content builder'.
Images: For images I used myecovermaker.
Testing: I used ispring. great stuff if you need something professional looking....but there's loads of cheap wordpress quizzes out there

Education: The membership guys podcast. I also joined their site which is excellent: http://www.membersiteacademy.com/ they now have a theme which is basically optimized so you can have a membership site running in no time.

Monetize your expertise podcast:http://www.grantweherley.com/podcast/
http://www.grantweherley.com/ his website has changed and looks a bit 'internet marketer' for me...but he's the real deal.

I used Chris lema's website to decide on what membership plug-in to buy. http://chrislema.com/

Good but didn't use: I bought learndash but didnt use it. it looks pretty amazing for an lms http://www.learndash.com/

Hope that helps. Feel free to contact me if you need need any help.

 

[EricZ]

@EricZ
Hi regarding the membership website.

Ive just finished it so have no idea if it will work. so can't help with how to market it.

But technically speaking:
Membership: I used woocommerce plus their subscriptions and members plugins. There are a lot cheaper and really good membership plugins but i wanted to have both a membership and a ebook shop so woocommerce is great because users can just purchase things from one account and wont have to keep making different accounts for buying different things.
Sales page: For the sales page i used 'thrive content builder'.
Images: For images I used myecovermaker.
Testing: I used ispring. great stuff if you need something professional looking....but there's loads of cheap wordpress quizzes out there

Education: The membership guys podcast. I also joined their site which is excellent: http://www.membersiteacademy.com/ they now have a theme which is basically optimized so you can have a membership site running in no time.

Monetize your expertise podcast:http://www.grantweherley.com/podcast/
http://www.grantweherley.com/ his website has changed and looks a bit 'internet marketer' for me...but he's the real deal.

I used Chris lema's website to decide on what membership plug-in to buy. http://chrislema.com/

Good but didn't use: I bought learndash but didnt use it. it looks pretty amazing for an lms http://www.learndash.com/

Hope that helps. Feel free to contact me if you need need any help.

That's awesome!

Your two posts above are a great Benchmark or model.

I've been interviewing successful authors on my blog for a while and your model/method is kind of like the Steve Scott model, where you build a palette of high quality books for a niche. But the membership site is a great example of how a non-fiction author can and should take it a step further to monetize "on the back end."

Thanks for the tips!

 

[EricZ]

I see there is actually a poll at the top of this post!
3:2 for "don't waste your time" ha! Negative whiners!

Well here's a guy who made 2k with his VERY FIRST book:
http://www.zbooks.co/2016/08/how-to-make-2001-publishing-your.html

His methods (ACX as usual surprised everyone) jibe well with Hick's above.

 

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[Justin Gesso]

I have been wondering if there is any money left in self published Ebooks. Is it still profitable? Can it be a perpetual income stream? How can you protect your investment from illegal pirating and torrents? Can you provide an app replacement instead?

Does anyone have any good links or resources for marketing?

Thanks everyone for helping me leave the slow lane.

Thanks.

The people I know doing well off of books (ebooks or whatever) are not just publishing tons of books under various pen names and having several "hit it big."

The people I know who are doing well have used books to help establish their personal brand, build an audience, and start spreading the value of their ideas. It seems once they hit a critical mass in terms of having built an audience, those same books that helped build their brand start becoming very significant income streams.

In other words, books can both be a way to build your personal brand and provide income. I haven't personally seen another model work, but perhaps I just don't know those people.

 

[AllenCrawley]

I was thinking about writing ebooks but 90 % of books or ebooks don't make any money for 2 reasons :

1) there are too much books available out there, thousands new titles every week
and pareto law says that 20 % of books will make 80 % of the money made in the industry , the other 80 % will make little money if any at all

2) people are used to watch videos and are lazy, less that 10 % of people actually read books on a regular basis.
so when people say that ebooks are part of the future, they don't tell us the whole truth.

The only rational reason to write books is to position yourself as the expert of your market, not to make money. you will make money on the back end with other products once you are trusted by your potential customers

Tell this to people like @ChickenHawk and @MTF and they'll just laugh.

One thing I've notice @GMSI7D is that you're full of statistics as to why something won't work. I have to say I get a chuckle out of those types of posts from you.

 

[Maxboost]

Thanks everyone for the advice. Another question I have would be about using a different name.

The book I would like to create is somewhat controversial and I would not want to have this bite me in the a$$ with my future projects later on.

Would it be a good idea to write with a different "alter" ego?

 

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[Rawr]

HM WARD was asked this, and she replied ' guys, the party is STILL going'. I haven't been active over the last 6 months but I'd agree. For fiction nothing is stopping you from putting out 3 books, getting a maillist up, spending some money on a cover and ads. What do you want to hear, that you can't make money? It's harder than it was because there is more competition but I think you still got a good shot if you can tell a good story. @HFR is a good one to ask he's got his finger on the pulse.