Is it really possible to earn money with ebooks? Yes, absolutely! Thus, the basic question would be answered at the beginning. How exactly this works and who I am, I explain in the following. Agreed? Great, here we go...
Did you bring some time? Well, then I'll take the liberty of catching up first, so that you can get to know me a little bit better. But don't worry, I don't stray too far from the subject.
Who am I and where do I come from?
My name is Oliver Schmid, I live and work in the beautiful Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance. I became the author or publicist of ebooks by a detour. This started in January 2009 on the subject of SEO (search engine optimization). At that time, I quickly discovered that I was given the opportunity to live creatively in this subject and at the same time to live off it. No sooner said than done. Since then I have been an independent Internet entrepreneur with a focus on online marketing. I am thoroughbred onliner and love what I do every day.
What started with the topic of SEO, I extended to various disciplines. Over the years, I have acquired extensive knowledge in the areas of SEO, Facebook, content and email marketing, as well as conversion optimization, WordPress, HTML, CSS and Amazon SEO, which are still the cornerstones of my daily work.
I live on my websites and ebooks, and that's not bad at all.
Much more important than earning a lot of money, however, was my personal freedom. The freedom to basically be able to do and leave everything I want at any time.
Those who have been pursuing the topic of SEO for the last 8 years have not escaped the ups and downs. And yes, I've seen them all. Optionally, my well running web pages of penguins or pandas were completely destroyed by Google. Nevertheless, I always focused my attention on earning my living as an Internet entrepreneur in the long run and invested accordingly and kept learning about new topics. And, voilà, I still live today from my websites and ebooks.
This was a very short version of a long journey, but I hope that it gave you a first impression of me and my work. But let's get back to the real issue:"Earning money with ebooks".
Earn money with ebooks? Aha, interesting!
At the end of 2015 I came across the subject of ebooks. Once again I was immediately captivated by one thing. Well, I've actually encountered the topic more often since 2009, but I have underestimated it, didn't understand it or dismissed it as dubious. Why dubious are you asking yourself? I have always encountered the topic in connection with the topic "getting stony rich quickly and hectically on the Internet". That was not my taste. Today I know I was wrong about my assessment. Today I understand.
At the end of 2015, I was clicked. It was clear to me that I am now working my way into this with full consistency.
And now, almost 1.5 years later, the course has been set. I have created more than 41 ebooks and published them under different pseudonyms. Further ebooks are already in planning.
"According to a representative study conducted by the Bitkom digital association in 2016, one in four German citizens prefers ebooks over bound books."
The entire e-publishing and digital publishing market has been growing steadily for years and according to expert forecasts there is still no end in sight. How could I have underestimated it so mercilessly?
Here is the forecast of sales in the market for e-publishing in Germany in the years 2015 to 2021 (in millions of euros):
© Statista / www.statista.com/
When I talk about making money with ebooks, I am always talking about advisor's ebooks that satisfy a concrete need for a niche. I can't tell you how to market a novel. Just to be clear from the start.
This is important to me: When I talk about content (I avoid "text" or "content") in the following and in the future, I always talk about content that pops into the brain. Contents that give pleasure. Contents that surprise and deliver real added value. Content that satisfies a concrete need. Contents that provide a perfect answer to a concrete need. We are talking about content that is pointedly positioned in a niche. Content that can be created and loved with love.
If you are now panting because you are not ready and/or able to do so, because it means a lot of work or is expensive (if you are going to buy the content), please take this advice to heart: Let it stay! Don't read any further, close the browser, close your laptop and forget about the topic. There are already a lot of bad contents in the net. Your time and that of your readers is simply too bad.
Okay, let's move on....
How exactly can I earn money with ebooks?
If you want to earn money with an ebook, this basically means three things:
- You have to write an ebook
- You have to publish an ebook
- You have to market the ebook
I skip the points "Write an Ebook" and "Publish an Ebook" at this point, my co-author Alexandra Latour has written a detailed step-by-step guide.
As far as marketing is concerned, I always see two good ways to market an ebook that are recommended depending on your requirements and means. The easy and the extensive way.
The easy way is quickly explained: Write an ebook, use a distributor to publish it and then concentrate exclusively on the Amazon channel to promote the ebook permanently. This is a relatively simple and yet efficient way.
The extensive path includes all relevant channels and plays the entire range of online marketing.
Back to my path and the specific example I have mentioned....
I have been running the Bartagame.de (bearded dragons) website since 2009 and chose the theme "choose a theme that interests you and I know who you are". For a long time, I have either not refinanced this website or have only rarely refinanced it with AdSense or Affiliate. Actually, it was and still is a hobby. In order to start with the topic "Earning money with ebooks", I chose this project to create my first ebook. So I had an additional marketing channel with the website, as there were already about 400 visitors per day.
All right, so what have I actually done?
- Wrote a comprehensive guidebook on the subject of bearded dragons. I used the contents of the website as a basis for the ebook, revised and edited it.
- An attractive cover designed.
- The website has been restructured accordingly.
- A landing page (sales page) created and prominently integrated.
- A newsletter system with MailChimp implemented.
- All distributors and self-publishing providers compared.
So for this ebook, I have three channels to market it. The distributor or self-publishing provider, the website (Bartagame.de) and the new e-mail newsletter. As a distributor I chose BookRix, but I concentrate mainly on Amazon.
What is a distributor or self-publishing provider?
The distributor - in my case BookRix - serves as the central contact point for publishing my ebook in more than 70 stores at the same time. This includes all well-known stores such as Amazon, Apple iBookstore, Kobo, Ebook. de, Thalia, Google Play and many more. Amazon accounts for about 90 % of the revenues, the remaining 10 % is distributed among all other stores.
In the meantime, there are a number of distributors and self-publishing providers. The most important ones I would like to mention here are Bookrix, epubli, Xinxii, Neobooks, Beam, Bookwire, Books on Demand (BoD) and last but not least Amazon with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
No sooner said than done, the ebook Bartagamen: Deutschlands großer Ratgeber (bearded dragons: Germany's great advisor ) was at Amazon and in the other stores. Since Amazon supplies the majority of the cake, the main aim is to bring the ebook to light at Amazon, i. e. to optimize the ranking of the ebook to the defined keywords (in my case, for example,"bearded dragons","bearded dragons", etc.). And that brings us to the Amazon ranking factors.
Amazon evaluates the performance in various key figures:
- Number of clicks
- sales figures
- conversion rate
- assessments
- Ebook Title
- description
In the ebook "Writing ebooks and marketing them correctly" I go into the Amazon ranking factors in detail and give concrete help. Therefore, I deliberately only mention this briefly here.
How much money can you earn with an ebook?
Writing and marketing eBooks The monthly revenues of this ebook (including website) are in the low three-digit range. Of course, I am a little cautious about this. This is satisfactory for a single EBook so far. It will be exciting if you continue to think about this.
As mentioned above, I have now published 41 ebooks and I am constantly working on new ones. With a little imagination, it clicks right now and you're not as prejudiced and blind as I've been for years.
With this small article I hopefully was able to show that money can be made with an ebook (or numerous ebooks).
Best regards
Oliver
Picture: © Pixabay.com