Images by Maarten Takens
Writing your own book is a great way to make some extra money. In the past you would have to practically beg a book publishing company to look at your final copy. There was little chance anything would come of it. Even though you could make the extra money it was only a pipe dream. Something that only the privileged could aim for, unless you were completely lucky and caught a break.
These days that is not the case. With the technology we have today it means that anyone can publish a book on their own. You don’t need anything apart from the desire to make it happen and the ability to sit down and write it. In a few months you can turn around to people and say you’re a published author. Whether you make any sales or not is a different story, but you’d have a book. If you want to know how easy it is we can go over a few ways you can make it happen.
A real life book
There’s a service on Amazon that will take your electronic book and turn it into a hard-copy book. You can sell the book in the Amazon book store and whenever someone buys a copy they will print it and send the book straight to the customer. You basically do nothing apart from write the book and upload it into the Amazon system.
If course it’s not all chocolate fountains and mint flavored roses. Because the book has to be printed on paper you will obviously make a lot less money than an electronic version. You will have to decide if it’s worth your while. Still, you can actually say to people you have your own physical book, which not a lot of people can say. But you don’t have to go with a printed version.
The Kindle store
The Kindle is definitely taking the world by storm. The amount of books available in the Kindle store has now surpassed the physical copies. Amazon actually sells more electronic copies than they do real books. How awesome is that? It makes it even easier to make money. You only need to format your book into a .MOBI file and it will take you 5 minutes to upload it.
The great thing about selling Kindle books is the money you can make. You will get around 70% of the profits from each one sold. This is fantastic because you’re not just using the Kindle store as somewhere to sell your book. Amazon will actually promote it for you, and it will be in their search engine so people can find it when they’re looking for a book. You can literally make money without any marketing.
Write an eBook
Everyone should be familiar with eBooks, which usually come in the form of PDF’s. These will also make you great money. Everything you sell is yours to keep, but you will have to do all the marketing on your own. They are still very easy to make. All you need to do is write out the book in a word processor and pay someone to format it for you. You can do it yourself if you’re able.
Once you have it ready to sell there’s a million different things you can do. One of the easiest is probably to start a blog and gather a following. When you have a large enough audience you can be sure that people will buy your book directly from your blog. If you have enough visitors it’s an easy way to earn extra money, or even a full-time income.
About the Author: This entry was authored by Ronald Hodge, an avid graphic designer and blogger.
