The ebook industry has not only revolutionized self-publishing, but its also made it entirely possible for regular people like you and I to write a book about virtually anything, and have it earn a passive income month after month.
One of the best examples I can tell you about of someone who makes a remarkable amount of money every month writing ebooks is a gentlemen by the name of Steve Scott. Search for a book about blogging or writing, and you’ll be sure to find a title from Steve Scott. Even more impressive than his writing are his income reports. In May 2014 alone, he made $65,643.53 in ebook publishing income for the month! That’s an incredible amount of revenue!
Self publishing has made the barriers to entry so low that literally anyone can get in on the ebook business. It costs practically nothing. You don’t have to be a writer or even a subject matter expert. You just have to be willing to put together an awesome draft, find yourself a good editor, and make your ebook something that people will want to genuinely read and share with people they know.
As a matter of fact, the more I’ve researched ebook publishing and making money online, the more I’ve found that there are 4 central ingredients to making your efforts a success. These are things that go beyond putting together a great manuscript, proofreading, and designing a catchy book cover.
Here are the four things you’ll want to keep in mind as you work on learning how to write ebooks for money.
Table of Contents
Produce Quality Products
One of the bad things about epublishing is that it is virtually possible for anyone to get anything published. Translation: There is a lot of garabage out there! I can personally attest to this. On several occasions I’ve downloaded ebooks where the content was too broad, unhelpful, or just down-right low quality.
Like anything you make for sale, your customers will see right through your attempts to simply make money if you publish low or even mediocre content. Write great content! Great content that readers can really use will not only get you better reviews, but it will also do something else very important:
Build a following. Building a following is important because it is how you can easily make future sales. As people download your book, you should include some sort of email collector where you can build a solid sales list of good prospects. After all, when someone likes something you’ve written previously, they will be far more inclined to see what new or additional products you’ve got to offer.
This ties well into our next point …
Always Be Producing New Content
When someone reads one book you’ve written and then goes back to your author page to find out that you don’t have any other books to offer, you’ve just missed out on a golden sales opportunity! Repeat customers are hungry for content, so keep it coming.
To paraphrase Steve Scott, no one gets rich writing and selling just one book. The real money starts when you have a whole portfolio of titles to offer. This both proves your dominance in this area as a subject matter expert, and it satisfies the customers curiosity to take in more material. The benefit for you: More sales!
Remember to make sure your books are related to the subject matter you are trying to capitalize in. If you write a book about how to make money and then release a book about weightlifting, chances are your previous customers from the “make money” book won’t convert over to the weightlifting book.
Target Specific Keywords
Just like Google, Amazon is a search engine. It has to make educated guesses about what its users are looking for, and then display the best and most relevant products in some particular and quantifiable order.
This is why targeting specific keywords in your title and book description can be helpful. Just like with the major search engines and basic search engine optimization (SEO), certain search phrases generate much higher authoritative results than other search phrases will. SEO experts know to avoid these types of phrases because they are too high competition for ranking their websites well. Instead, they go after the lower competition phrases where they will have a much better chance of having their website be found.
The same can be true for your next ebook. If you write a book with a similar title and description as one that sells millions of copies every day, then forget it! Instead, try competing against titles that don’t have quite the same amount of popularity or authority.
Fortunately this is easy to do. Amazon publishes the ranks of all books right on the book’s sale page. This can help you understand very quickly which books are selling well and which ones you have a strong chance of beating!
Get Positive Reviews
Just like how backlinks can help a website to rank higher in the search engines, Amazon uses reviews to gauge how to rank an ebook. Obviously from a sales standpoint, it would make sense that Amazon would put only the highest ranked products first before the lower ranked ones, right?
Getting positive reviews on Amazon can be a tricky process. There are many ways to do this:
- Earn them from your readers. If you have a truly quality product, then your readers should have no problem leaving you positive 5-star comments.
- Give away your book for free. One of the most popular ways to earn lots of positive reviews is to make your ebook free for five days using the Amazon Select program. Even though making your book free doesn’t earn you any money, it does put it in front of thousands and thousands users who at any time could read and leave positive comments about your product.
- Charge next to nothing. Like the “free” Amazon Select strategy, making your ebook $0.99 will also help entice people to take a chance on your book and potentially leave positive comments.
- Buy them. Even though I do not promote or recommend that you use this strategy, I will for the sake of completeness mention that it is possible to buy fake, positive reviews from services like Upwork and Fiverr. Again, I don’t recommend that you do this.
The more verified positive reviews you can collect, the more “votes” effectively you have that say you’ve got a good product, and Amazon can use that information to help decide if they should put your product up front and center.
Writing eBooks for Money – Summary
Ebooks can be very easy to write and create. They are a great way to earn money and sell digital products without needing to have inventory. But when it comes to understanding how to write ebooks for money, a little bit of strategy can go a long ways. Make sure that what you are producing is a good quality product that people would be willing to trade their hard earned money for. Don’t stop at just one product; always be creating as much content as you can so that you have more to work with. Just like with website SEO, it pays to do a little keyword research so that your product doesn’t necessarily have to compete with big name titles. The more and more you’re able to get your awesome product in the hands of your readers, the higher your chances of collecting as many possible reviews as you can.
Featured image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I am planning on publishing my first ebook this year and so I really find this post to be very valuable, especially the part about producing more content for my audience. I also really appreciate your tips about getting positive reviews. However, what is the impact of bought reviews compared to the ones that you earned?