How to Make Money from eBooks

Most people believe that success or failure in self publishing is about the number of copies that are sold and the price of each one. Unlike printed books,  when it comes to ebooks the opportunity does not end there.

The fact is ebook publishing provides an endless array of possibilities that stretch beyond traditional print book sales. For instance, Private Labeling of ebooks is a concept by which the intellectual property rights to the ebook are sold along with the ebook itself, allowing anyone to republish a PLR ebook for profit, and claim the work as their own both legally and ethically.

Let’s examine a traditional ebook “sales” process when ebooks are “sold” through engaging sales pages using a successful template. In most cases this template is written in the first person, rich in text, testimonials, photos and success stories. The idea of the sales page is targeted at one of two goals:

A) To generate revenue from the sale of the ebook.

B) To exchange the ebook for information, in most cases a name and email address to be used in permission based email marketing endeavors.

In option “B” the free ebook, typically rendered in the form of Portable Document Format (PDF) for its ‘clickable’ link capacity, becomes an interactive, informative viral document that features affiliate ads which in turn generate revenue.

All the revenue from the clickable links are paid to the author through affiliate programs. Best of all this process continues for as long as the ebook is used and passed around.

Let’s say you write an ebook about your trip to Paris. In your ebook you share the name of the travel agent who booked the dream European vacation for you. By including  traceable affiliate links from your travel agent, you earn a 15% commission each time someone orders travel services from them. It’s that simple!

Or let’s imagine that you sell a book about marketing and inside are affiliate links to tools which will help people monetize the traffic to their website.

Instead of profits stopping at the point of sale like a paperback or a hardcover book,  ebooks are a gift that keeps on giving!

You could also include links to your own products ie. a second or third book also filled with affiliate links.  Imagine every time you quoted a famous author in your own ebook, you could easily turn that quote into a link for an Amazon book from the author of that quote.

Pictures used in ebooks should also feature links. Imagine a romance novel with pictures of lonely women eating ice cream on a couch could be turned into a lucrative link to Ben and Jerri’s flavor of the month home delivery. A photograph of a notebook computer could link to a Compaq laptop on Amazon. The sky truly is the limit when it comes to ebook publishing.

Another great way to generate affiliate revenue in an ebook is to include a bibliography with clickable Amazon affiliate links to the books you used in your research, or referenced in your ebook.

All you really need to do earn residual income from ebooks is your imagination…