![]() 9 minutes Everywhere I look it seems people are releasing eBooks and trying to cash in on their audience. There are quite a few success stories out there, but for the most part, people just aren’t making the sales they want. ![]() As I have had a lot of success with my own eBook, Cloud Living (no longer for sale, follow instead, I thought it would be helpful to a lot of people if I wrote a guide about the whole process. For those of you who don’t know, Cloud Living is my eBook which teaches people how I make a living online. That being said, I want to make it clear that I don’t make a living by teaching people how to make a living online. My biggest successes are in personal services which offer an affiliate program and various sites I run in the health niche. My Own Example When I had the idea to create Cloud Living, I had just finished giving away a free eBook on blogging. It was 90 pages long and included most of what I know when it comes to growing a blog. As I don’t just make money through blogging, I wanted to make an expanded guide which offered tips on affiliate marketing. In addition to that, I wanted to make the guide a resource for people who want to make cloud living (making money from the internet) a reality. Therefore, I included a number of interviews with people succeeding online and my own tips for getting things done, even if you have a full-time job. The product ended up being around 176 pages and I couldn’t be happier with the end result. Something you may find interesting is that I genuinely just wanted to make $1,000 from releasing the guide. That way I knew I would have helped a lot of people and the months of work it took to put the guide together will have been somewhat worth it. • On launch day, the eBook brought in over $4,000. • Almost 700 copies of the guide have been purchased • Approximately 80% of the $30,000 is purely from sales. The rest is through affiliate links inside the book • January, 6 months after launch, is on track to be the second best month ever in terms of sales Before I share how I made all of this possible, let’s look at some of the reasons for writing an eBook in the first place, apart from the obvious financial benefits. Why Write an eBook? The obvious answer to most people, is money. If that is your sole motivation though, then you’re missing out. There are actually quite a few reasons to write an eBook that you may not have initially thought of: • Position Yourself as An Expert – Since launching Cloud Living, I have been absolutely overloaded with interview requests. The guide makes it clear that I know what I’m doing online, so people come to me for advice. If you write a rubbish guide, then nobody is going to think very highly of you. Yet, if you make the product the best you can make it, people will start to notice you. I now regularly see people refer to making money online as “Cloud Living’ and a number of “make money” blogs now exist with Cloud in the title. This alone shows me the big influence that some people can have. • Having Your Own Product is Massive – Have you ever tried to promote a product someone else created on your own blog? I have in the personal development space and the conversions are, quite frankly, awful. Once, with 5,000 subscribers, I only pushed about 15 sales after writing a whole post on a product. Yet, when I release my own work, it sells really well. Remember that people read your site for you, so they’re more likely to buy a product if it has your name on. • Help People – The eBooks that sell the best are the ones that fill a genuine need. Therefore, one good reason to write an eBook is to share knowledge on a topic you know a lot about, and truly help your buyers. A few days ago I received an email from someone telling me that they were now making over $10,000 a month thanks to my guide. There is no way I can describe in words how good reading that email made me feel — and it’s one of many. • Constant Income – Having a $4,000 day was awesome, but it’s the constant income from selling eBook’s that I enjoy. ![]() I now have two products (, 2 (no longer available) that I actively promote and earn a good passive income. Through nothing but a sidebar ad and regular website traffic, Cloud Living is on track to make around $3,000 this month. You don’t have to be an experienced writer with a string of publications in your name in order to publish an eBook and make money from it. Traditionally, a writer. Publishing your own ebook has never been easier! You could make money by writing your own & letting Kindle & iPad users buy your ebook on the online stores! ![]() I think that’s pretty amazing considering the product was launched 6 months ago. And, of course: to make money. Picking Your Topic Many of you might be tempted to write an eBook now, but have absolutely no idea what you’re going to write it on. If that’s you, this section will help. For those of you who think you have an idea and are ready to roll with it, I still think you should continue reading. There are a lot of eBooks that sell well, and a lot more that sell poorly. Often, the topic of the eBook makes a massive difference to whether or not it will succeed in making money. As a way to help you narrow down the ideas buzzing around your head right now, here are some of my suggestions to help you think of what topic you could write an eBook on: • What You Know About – The easiest way to create a great product, of course, is to write on a topic you know inside out. I have been building websites for four years and making a living with them for almost two, so I knew my subject well. If you know about something, there’s also a good chance you’ll be passionate about it. This will make it far easier to keep working on the guide and also allows you to give the best advice possible. • What Your Readers Want – As I have mentioned, it’s far easier to promote your own products (especially on a blog) than it is to promote things as an affiliate. ![]() If you have an audience already, why not find out what they want? You could do this by creating a poll and asking people specifically, or you could look at your most popular site pages / blog posts and see what your audience reacts to most. • How Can You Offer the Most Value – Believe it or not, we don’t always know what we want. Therefore, asking your readers what they want in a guide may not really be what they want to purchase. As an extra ‘test’ to ensure you are going to write an eBook on the right topic, ask yourself what you could write about that would help people the most. It may not be something you have the most knowledge on, but you might know enough to honestly help people. • Look Around Your Niche – Sites like StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter can be an absolute goldmine for product ideas. If you see what topics your industry really cares about, you can create a product that gives them exactly that. Additionally, you could check out the top blogs in your industry and see what they are promoting. It never hurts to ask someone if their product is selling well. While I don’t recommend you copy what other people are putting out there, this can give you some good ideas. Hopefully these tips have given you topic ideas for your eBook. If you’re still looking for suggestions, leave a comment at the bottom of the post and I’m sure other readers here can help you brainstorm. The Creation Process Once you’ve decided you want to write an eBook and know what topic it’s going to be about, it’s time to get started. There are a number of eBook creation tools and software packages out there, but I keep the process fairly simple. First of all, I write everything in. This is a free office suite that works on all popular operating systems. A lot of tools that can turn documents into PDF format do not allow custom security settings and most of them cannot export hyperlinks properly. Thankfully, Open Office does not have this problem. In terms of structure, I like to map out exactly what I’m going to talk about in the guide and get all of my content sections down first. From there, I can slowly work towards completing the guide by filling out a few each day. After writing your guide, you probably want to work on the design. I use some nice covers on my eBooks so that they look like real physical products. Of course, I do not pretend they are more than eBooks; it simply looks better. As well as giving the design an external look, you can also work on the internals. I like to start the first page of an eBook with another picture of the cover and copyright information. From there, I design a nice footer that will display on every page so keep a general ‘theme’ running throughout the guide. And, finally, I replace all headings with an actual image file so that they look much better. A lot of people design their eBooks differently so you should look around before just following my own outline. To create the graphics I personally learned how to use Photoshop but you could also hire someone for cheap from. Once you have your eBook written and it’s looking pretty, you should then set-up a payment processor. This will allow you to receive money for your guide and have it automatically delivered to a buyer, instantly. I personally use to handle this process as it works perfectly and handles everything behind the scenes for just $5 per month. I noticed many other sites like Problogger and Copyblogger also use them. Getting started with is quick and totally free (7 day trial). You can upload your eBook PDF file into their admin area, set your price, and then you will receive a ‘Buy now’ link code. This allows you to send people straight to PayPal to buy your guide. Once the payment is approved, e-junkie will automatically send the buyer the eBook, without you having to do anything. Now that everything is in order and the payment processor is sorted, you’re going to want to look at promoting your eBook. Marketing Your eBook The sole task of writing an eBook is sadly not enough to bring you the benefits that we discussed earlier — you actually have to promote your work. The tactics involved in marketing an eBook are very similar to the tactics involved in marketing anything online, but I’ll still share my tips here: • Your Audience – My aim is to always be totally honest with you guys so the first thing I must say is that it is much easier to sell and promote an eBook if you already have an established audience. Ask yourself whether it would be wise to build up your audience a bit first before launching your first product. Darren Rowse at Problogger didn’t launch an eBook until his 5th year of writing for the site, but managed to pull in an estimated $450,000 (based on my calculations using his public sales figures) from a $19 product. It’s never too late to launch a product, but it might be too early. If you have an established audience, that’s a great place to start to get your guide out there. • Networking – A few months ago I attended a workshop in London which taught people how to quit their day jobs. I didn’t go to learn about that though (I already have quit my job), but to learn about how to teach people how to quit their job. This is because I write about personal development and find it fascinating. Although I didn’t go to this workshop to make money, I certainly met a few people who have since purchased eBooks from me. • Affiliates – Out of the $4,500 or so that the eBook made on the day of launch, around $500 of this money was in affiliate commissions. I allow people to promote the product and if they refer a sale, I will give them 51% of $37, which is $18.87. I can do this because it is free for me to duplicate my PDF file, and I get my products in front of people who would not have otherwise known about them. To get affiliates, I like to focus on bloggers and gain their attention by regularly commenting or their site or maybe writing a few articles before pitching anything. Give and you will receive. You could also use a service like Clickbank, which I’m going to be testing shortly. • Offline Press – The reason this month is going to be the second best month ever for Cloud Living is because I received some great offline press recently. I was featured in an article () in the UK’s second biggest newspaper about people making a living online. This brought thousands of people to my website and resulted in a lot more sales than usual. If you can get featured in relevant, offline press, then that can do wonders for your online sales. • Search Engine Traffic – I know some people who create eBooks solely for the sake of making money from the search engine traffic they are currently receiving. I also know people who purposefully build eBooks and websites in a niche because they can make money, not because they know about the subject. If you can find what problems people are searching for online, and rank in the top results of Google with a solution to that problem (your guide), then there’s a lot of money to be made. I have personally spoken to people making over $300,000 per year with this method. If I had to estimate how many Cloud Living sales were based on these as a percentage, I would say: • Original Audience: 75% • Affiliates: 15% • Offline Press: 5% • Search Engines: 4% • Networking: 1% If you can pull off any of these methods well, you’re going to have a good chance at making sales and enjoying the other benefits that owning your own product has to offer. If you’re going to focus on just one or two, then definitely work to build up your own audience and gain a list of affiliates who would like to promote your product. The Final Details That I Couldn’t Miss I know this has been an absolutely monster post (although I’m sure you are used to them by now), but there are a few more points I want to talk about in order to make this guide as useful as possible. There a few things that didn’t really fit into the other sections here but definitely deserve to be discussed. Handling Refunds When I launched Cloud Living, I never mentioned any form of money-back guarantee. Maybe it would have increased sales, but there have literally only been 3 refunds in over 600 purchases. I actually meant to launch the product with a 30-day money-back guarantee but since it was selling well with that, I never made the change. If someone is clearly being scammy by purchasing the book and requesting a refund in the same day or something of that nature, then I will try not to give a refund as that only encourages scammers to con more people. If someone seems even slightly legitimate though then I will happily give a refund as quickly as possible. It’s not worth the possible reputation management nightmare for the price of one guide. Pricing I personally like to price my products around the $27 – $37 range when working with eBooks. I know in the future, when I create bigger products with more features, that price will rise quite a lot. The price of your eBook should really be whatever you think it is worth. After all, you made it and if it doesn’t sell, you’re the one who has to deal with that. Of course, ideally you will want to pick a price point that is going to get you sales from the start. Price too low and you run the risk of your product looking low-value and miss-worthy. Price it too high and you may alienate your audience with an out-of-reach price point. My advice for pricing is simple: see how other people in the niche are pricing their guides, for what, and start with something similar. I personally think it’s better to price a product too low than too high. If you price it too low then at least you will get sales and can know to increase that. If you price your product too high and then have to bring that down, it will be clear to your audience that sales are low and you lose any social proof you may have had. My Own Success This guide is just my thoughts on creating a profitable eBook online. There may be better ways to do everything I have suggested, but these are the steps I take. $30,000 is nothing compared to some of the launches out there, but the result is something I’m proud of and also something I think many of you here would like to reach. If you’ve made it this far, I have to try and tempt you to subscribe to the (or get ). Articles like this one are posted at least once per week. And yes, they really are this long. As always, I would appreciate your feedback in the comments and support on Twitter if you like this article! It’s a very nice product indeed that you brought out there. As far as I can tell it’s the only in it’s sort on cloud living/ free living / financial independence. Of course there are places like project mojave but those cost tons of money and for those of us who want to do things at our own pace this is great. Making an eBook of my own is on my list to do in the near future, I just hope it will be remotely as successful as your creation. Creating your own product is a huge challenge but once you’ve got one that is selling nicely your name will be out there more and more. If you’ve done things right chances are future products by yourself will be bought by the same people who bought the first one. A very exciting prospect and a great resource to tap in to. On a sidenote, it seems easy money but don’t be fooled by the hard work it takes to come this far. Countless hours of writing, editing, marketing and actively selling. But at least you can do it form the comforts of your own home (or wherever you have wifi support.) Thanks for the great post and the inspiration. Hi Glen, Fantastic article on a topic that I always viewed as “pipe dream” type stuff but having read your post I think anyone with a good writing style and sound level of topic knowledge can have a good crack at writing & selling an ebook. The idea of creating your very own product and having full control over what gets published and so on is an extremely liberating concept and appears to fit in perfectly with a more independent style of living. You’ve given me some serious food for thought now as I’m leaving full time employment to begin a freelance online marketing service (mostly travel related) so I can already visualise a few niche ebooks that could genuinely help people. Thanks a million! I gotta say Glen, really impressive. I could read these kind of articles all day. Congratulations with the success of Cloud Living. I was actually very curious how much you made with it:-). The book actually helped me a lot! Since I’ve bought that book, I created 4 affiliate websites. One is already making some money. I now I’m building a blog that I will launch very soon. For the people that consider buying the book: just do it. It’s worth a lot more than Glen asks for it. Besides that, Glen also helps you out when you have questions. I recently emailed him about my new blog and he really helped me with that. Cloud Living will be one of the product that I will be offering on my blog because it’s really top notch. Keep up the good work Glen! I found this post through a tweet from Jonathan Fields (the master of valuable content) and found the wealth of info to be completely relevant. I am currently (you guessed it!) writing an eBook on Branding and Marketing for Artists. While the writing and design won’t be a problem for me, it was great to get some further insight on pricing, delivery (e-Junkie), affiliate info and promo percentages. Plus, my confidence vacillates weekly and this post put me back in the “Hells yeah, I can do this!” mindset. So, thanx a mil for that. Once you’ve built up a relationship with a blogger by writing articles for them or regularly contributing comments, just send them an email about what you’re working on. Just be totally normal, don’t worry about sounding professional because I’ve found that makes things very impersonal. Give them a link to your affiliate area and let them know when the product will launch (give a week in advance, at least). Remind them of who you are (“I regularly write comments,” “I wrote X article”) and see what happens. I hope that is better for you! This is good stuff here Glenn. I myself have written an eBook before which also made a good number of sales, although not as big as yours. I have couple of problems though. First one is that I have never launched the affiliate programs and even though if I launched it, Im really not sure how will it work back then. The other one is offline press. Im not popular here in my country and this is something that Im working out this year. Both questions are answered in this lengthy article! Thanks again man! Great Post, Glen (as always!) This will be invaluable information when I do my own eBook eventuallyI’m still in the build up the reputation on the blogging scene phase! My mission.share what I know to help people to help themselves. As I’m a natural health practitioner doing a modality I know works (my clients keep sending their friends to me!) I know I need to spread the word more widely.a huge project! Your work here, on PluginID and HQHow has been a great inspiration! Thank you SOOOO much! One question.as a South African, I have a HUGE problem with PayPal.they don’t allow payments INTO accounts from our country!!!! Any suggestions on how to solve this problem, because some sites (like Squidoo) that I want to make use of, only use PayPal!? Keep up the good work! Table Mountain’s waiting to spread its table cloth for you! What a great article. I have a product that have been trying to find ways of producing, but my full time caregiver salary of $0 makes it pretty difficult. Although I have sold a little over 100 of my 911 PREP Kits, I have not been able to help people in the way I dreamed. After reading some of your blogs, I managed to put together every piece of my kit in a template format, add a lot of really good content about the lesons I’ve learned through the 50+ medical emergencies I’ve gone through with both parents and put it into a PDF. Proofreading should be done tomorrow. After that, I will relaunch the new e-version on several web sites with strong domain names and follow you’re great advice. Your passion for helping people really shines through. I think Eckert Tolle would be proud. I love writing ebooks. I have written about 10 in the last decade. Some were great some not so great. I still make money to this day from an ebook I wrote 6 years ago (with revisions). All I do is try to come up with the next greatest ebook. Some people try to come up with the next best phone app, I do that with ebooks. Just finished my latest one February 2010: “No Building Codes” and it can be found. It is a book about where you can still find places with no building codes in the United States. Why did I write it? Because there was no book like it in existence–which was the impetus to write it. That’s called finding a niche–your key to success! Best of luck to you aspiring authors! I am going to launch an e-book in a week. I have two important questions I would love to know the answer to. One on the value of social media followers the other is about the value of AdWords advertising: 1- I dont have many followers on my blog. I have over a thousand on Twitter, and 60 on Facebook. Are these followers a decent replacement for my blog followers? 2- I had a promo from AdWords so have $100 of free advertising that I am ready to use. Is this any good for selling the e-book in your experience? Hope you can answer this, I would be thrilled if you can! Glen, first, always a pleasure to learn from your posts! I’m not sure if I have the passion to create an e-book at this point, I need to stay focused on maintaining what I do have, which are several affiliate websites. I’m adding more content to each one at this time versus setting up more that I feel overwhelmed with since I have a full time job. Could any of this be applied to affiliate mini sites (4-5 pages)? Secondly, would you use your check list in cloud for maintainence of affiliate sites, or would that only apply to blogging? Sorry so long. I really enjoyed your information as it is hard to find legit advice online. I’ve been searching about writing an ebook and launching it and find nothing but fake payment proof and testimonials. I am a single mom and my current situation has inspired me to want to help others. I don’t have alot of cash to assisst in creating and marketing my ebook so if anyone has any suggestions I would be grateful to try. What are some good resources for proofreading and ecovers without spending alot of money and someone stealing an idea? Hi TJ Have you considered self publishing? I did a kindle book on Amazon, (Kindle Books sell at rate of 147 to every 100 ordinary books) and then found out about Smashwordsa better free publishing platform. They distribute yr book everywhere!even to Kindle, Amazon, Barnes & Noble or whatever all the big book stores are! Then you could go to Create Space (in Amazon) & publish yr own paperback for free. Buy a few copies yr self, (about $4 or less) & hold a library reading, book tour etc etc. Now you are a published author & the Local newspapers like that, so do TV stations. 10% interviews on TV & radio are authors! Now you have positioning power, credibility & can put that in yr email signature etc etc Just some ideas. Happy Christmas & a prosperous new year. Hi Glen, I couldn’t believe I’ve read all this long but useful article. I have recently downloaded OpenOffice since I researched online and came to similar conclusion as you that it is the best PDF link conversion tool out there in the market. Also, I hope to signup for ClickBank and see how things goes with my near future eBook projects. My niche is somewhat complex. A bit of personal development, a bit of theology, a bit of technology etc. I am enjoying riding in your train so far. Thanks again. I’m am currently “on the fence” about writing an EBook – my friend’s son did it and it has really done well (although he’s had to slash the price a couple of times), but for his first book, I’d say he has done great. I wanted to start out with a “blog or vlog” but my friends have all encouraged me to to go straight for something I could ultimately get paid for. They said “why would you want to impart all your knowledge into doing a blog/vlog and not get any money for it? My problem is, I’m not that familiar with computers to start doing an EBook, I can barely figure out how to do a bolglol. Also.why is it sooooo important to have a “Facebook Account?” Any help or advice you could throw my way would be greatly appreciated AND noted!! Sincerely Gracelynn A. I have a natural health “product” idea, if thats what it should be called. I have reversed a disease over time that has never been done by mankind to my knowledge. As far as Google is concerned, there has never been a recorded case. I have given my time free for years as a Holistic Health Practitioner for those that need help and could not afford it. Today, I would like to share my miracle of faith and individual hard work for hope when all else fails. Is there a market for that without having a current blog or following? How do I start? The first bunch of replies to this article are obviously written by the author. Jan 19th at 12:41 12:43 12:45 they all say the same thing AMAZING POST! Then the author replies two min later to all of them. So everybody just HAPPENED to finish reading the article within minutes of each other, the author ALSO just happened to be monitoring it and replied to them all a minuteaapart? Looks like copy paste reaponses, because really there was nothing AMAZING in the article at all, it was just common sense. I learned nothing, and since he is faking his audience, it shows his over inflated sense of self importance. “i just noticed how the word cloud is poppibg up in the title of everything showing me just how influential SOME PEOPLE are” lol are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that YOU started the “cloud” jargon being thrown around? Its like you even know how full of bs you are so you said SOME PEOPLE instead of how influential “I AM”. Lol NOBODY has ever heard of you, you didn’t invent the word cloud and you had absolutely ZERO to do with its widespread use. And i HIGHLY DOUBT youre getting “interview requests ALL THE TIME”. Random people emailing you general questions is not an “interview”. Lol you’re so full of isht man, nice try. A lot of just great advice in this post, but weirdly enough, what stood out the most for me in this post is that I need to build my audience. I need to start promoting and working on S.E.O. A little more (and by a little more I mean being up at 1:00 AM on a Sunday with a half consumed cup of old coffee from the fridge posting to like ladders on Facebook and commenting on posts on feature blog posts). Well anyway, I guess it will all add up, and thus, I should get right to it! Note: Two cool things • To help you take action I’ve created a downloadable tool called The Beginner’s Guide to Rapidly Self-Publishing Kindle eBooks — scroll down and you’ll see a form, pop in your best email and I’ll send it to you for free. • There’s an awesome infographic at the bottom of this post, helpful for you visual learners. Feel free to share that or embed on your own site. Total Reading Time: 8 minutes. Before the Dark Ages, the industrial revolution, the birth of technology, and even the internet — we had books. Books are one of the few constants that distinctly identify human culture. But with the birth of digital products and the internet, one thing has changed, and that is the explosion of eBooks. With Amazon, Kindle eBooks have become a booming business, and writers of all types are creating a name for themselves, and making a nice income. Self-publishing has flipped the script on the traditional publishing model. With the internet as our platform, anyone can create a new stream of income for themselves, of course with a little work. That’s where Saeed Rajan of Escape Your Desk Job comes in. Saeed has been making around $2,700 a month by publishing eBooks on Amazon, and he hasn’t written a word himself. When Saeed wrote to me about this, I knew it was my duty to share his story and create this case study interview on his first book, so you could learn more about this opportunity. Use Saeed’s experience as a model, and you could be well on your way to a brand new stream of passive income. In my opinion, this is a fantastic way to get started as a solopreneur and get your feet wet. I even mention self-publishing as one of my top 15 solopreneur businesses in. Below is my case study with Saeed Why did you decide to get into Kindle eBook publishing? I didn’t have a lot of time to start a business from scratch, so I was looking for a passive income (spend money to make money) type of venture. I had a couple friends who were making a killing from selling apps on the App Store, but I didn’t have enough courage to put that sort of money into a project that I wasn’t familiar with. After a bit of research, I learned that self-publishing eBooks was a very similar model to producing apps, but it was a lot cheaper and a lot easier to get done. [ Arman’s note: If you do want to create an app, use this ] The costs weren’t too high, so I didn’t have to even think twice about it. After posting a couple job descriptions for my first eBooks, I realized how much more simple it would be to find an author as opposed to an app developer. How much did it cost? My first eBooks cost me a total of $375. I paid $350 to get the book written, and I paid $25 to have a professional looking book cover made for the book. How long did it take to make your first sale? From the time I decided to publish an eBook, to the day I got my first sale was exactly 2 weeks. My first eBook was published on February 8, 2013, and my first sale(s) came on February 10, 2013. I remember it like it was yesterday – I made a whopping $9 in profit in that one day. What’s the name of the book?. How much money has the book made you since you published it? As of September 30, 2014, this eBook has totaled $2,401.66 in total profit. This figure does not include sales made outside of America. The figure is actually much higher, but it would’ve taken a while to gather all the profits from every region the book is sold in. The eBook is still consistently making money, and although sales have decreased dramatically since it was published, the current return on investment is 740% (and counting) and the average profit 2014 has been $47.11 per month (not including any sales outside of America). Keep in mind that this money is coming in from doing zero work, and I’ve used the proceeds from the first eBook to scale and produce more books that pay just like this one. How did you decide on the topic of the eBook? I browsed through the Kindle Bestseller’s list and took note of what was already working. I noticed a few books on the Paleo diet in the bestsellers lists so I dug a little deeper into the subject. Reading customer reviews was a huge help. I learned a lot about the market, and learned what they did (and didn’t) like about the bestselling Paleo books. I noticed a lot of people complaining about not being able to eat the foods they crave, and how the recipes in the books were good, but too complicated. I also learned that baking had it’s own category on bestsellers lists, so I decided to come out with an eBook of simple, Paleo baking recipes. [ Arman’s note: this is a key learning that he applied from his research — awesome!] Any resources/tools you found helpful to get started? I used Elance (now ) [ Arman’s note: I use Upwork a lot and highly recommend it] to find a ghostwriter and I used to hire a designer who created my book covers. [ also recommended] was an awesome tool that made formatting the eBooks really easy for me. It’s a word processor that effortlessly compiles text into a Kindle-ready format (among others). I would only recommend using if you and your ghostwriters are both using a Mac. Microsoft Word is sufficient enough to get the job done otherwise. Is an awesome free tool you can use to make sure you’re not uploading any plagiarized work. What were the biggest mistakes/wastes of time/money? I made an update to the eBook – letting readers know about other books I’d come out with, and the updated eBook version I uploaded to the Kindle store was missing some chapters. Previewing your eBook thoroughly before it goes out to the public is key. It wasn’t until I got a couple bad reviews that mentioned the missing chapters that I fixed my mistake. I emailed Amazon’s help center and they graciously emailed all of the buyers with a new update. Another mistake I made came when I hired the same ghostwriter on for more eBooks in the same series. I think he got a little too comfortable with the job and he started skipping steps. I trusted him to do as good of a job with the new books as he did with the original, so I didn’t bother getting them proof-read by family members, and friends. I received a couple bad reviews on the eBooks and quickly realized that I should’ve been more thorough. Now, I ask my ghostwriters to send me segments of the book as they are completed. This way I can send some short reads to family and friends during the creation process and get their feedback on the content before it goes out to the public. How did you market the eBook? Any key PR/media wins? How did they happen? First I built up a bit of social proof, by purchasing copies of the eBook for friends and family to read on their Kindle devices in exchange for an honest review. I asked them to post the Review on the Amazon.com website so that people would be able to get their feedback. Next, I used Amazon’s KDP Promotions so my eBook would be available for free for just one day. I posted to Facebook, and a few websites that promoted free eBooks. Using this strategy, I was able to get more than 1200 downloads and I cracked the top 100 free eBooks right away. I later found out that a lot of the traffic had come from a popular ‘Real Food’ Facebook page that posted my free book to their followers. Amazon also rewards author’s who give away a lot of free eBooks by promoting them within the Amazon website. That was all the marketing I ever needed to get these results. If you did it all over again, what would you do differently? Knowing what I know now, I’d have paid a lot less for my first few eBooks. I paid somewhere around $0.04/word for the first set of books I came out with. After learning about the market, I know the competitive rate for most freelance writers is about $0.02/word (and keep in mind this rate increases for more rare niches). I’d have also scaled a little more quickly than I initially had. The investment for this eBook was small and I had the capacity to come out with another 3 eBooks for 3 separate niches at the time I started. This would’ve provided me a lot more capital from the proceeds, a lot more opportunity for scaling, and a much better understanding of the different markets on the Kindle stores. Not all markets are big payers, and some markets get saturated quickly. It’s really easy now to waste your money if you don’t perform the right research at the beginning. I’ve written on my blog describing in more detail how I go about doing this. I recommend anybody getting started to check it out and follow the steps closely to avoid the same mistakes I’ve encountered. [ Arman’s note: We all make mistakes, but we should learn from each other’s. Here are some of my ] What’s the 80/20 of successful publishing? What would any of our readers need in order to get their first eBook up and start makings some passive income? I’d say the 80/20 is giving the readers what they want. Like I mentioned, reading through the reviews of popular books will give a really good insight to what the audience is looking for. You already know the audience is there, so just give them what they want – and make sure it’s high quality – Amazon will do the rest. You really don’t need a lot to publish an eBook onto Amazon. Great write up. The book mentioned, Piece of Cake Paleo, looks like it only generates around $10 to $20 / mo at this point not sure if that’s correct, but if so, I’m Curious if like other folks publishing on Kindle his experience is that many books do limited sales and a few are bigger hits? Or if it’s that they do well initially than decline significantly? • Pingback: () • Pingback: How To Make Money Online 465 Different Ways – Linda's Blog() • Pingback: () • Pingback: Create an Amazing Blog and Make Money While You’re At It!() • Pingback: () • Pingback: () • Pingback: () • Pingback: 52 Legitimate Ways to Make Extra Money in Your Free Time() •. That's me — perched atop a little brick wall in Cinque Terre, Italy. My name is Arman Assadi and I'm based in San Francisco, CA. I'm a writer, solopreneur, consultant, wonder junkie, obsessive world traveler, soccer player, and former Googler. In 2012 I left my job at Google and began directing my own life and career. It hasn't always been easy, but over the years I've learned a lot about what it takes to be fulfilled and 'successful' in this new era of work. This website has evolved into a popular blog that helps people identify their life's craft and create a self-directed life. I invest most of my time in sharing these lessons with people like you. I also partner and consult with other digital companies, NYT bestselling authors, and entrepreneurs to help them grow, and write for global authority sites like Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Business Insider and more.
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January 2018
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