How eBooks Create Easy Passive Income

Have you ever wanted to write a book but not sure where to begin or how to get it published? Well this page is for you. Today I’ll show you how you can write an eBook and get it published within the hour online to start earning passive income for as long as you leave it up online.

First let me share my personal story with you as I was once in your shoes.

Freshman year of college while attending Ohio State, I discovered people online who were creating eBooks to make extra income passively and without much extra effort because once the books published online, the selling platform collects me sales, delivers my books to customers, etc without my involvement.

I found my passion that I wanted to write an eBook about, golf, because golf season was just starting and I made some practice drills for myself to use to shake off the winter rust that I thought everyone could benefit from.

Then I wrote the eBook, formatted it, and published it to Amazon Kindle’s Publishing Platform and forgot all about it a few weeks later. Several months went by and I received a check for a few hundred dollars from Amazon for my 80+ eBook sales that had occurred over the span from March 2014 through September 2014. This reminded me that I had written an eBook and showed me that it is possible to make money self publishing eBooks to online book platform’s such as Amazon Kindle. This breakthrough moment sparked my desire to create more success through eBooks and earn more money. By spring of 2015, I was making between $200-$300 per month from eBook sales, mostly from the original golf book but I also published a few new eBooks.

So there’s my recap of how I made money without any continued involvement once I hit publish. Now let’s get you on the right track track to earning passive income from eBook royalties like these.

December Sales Report for my 3 eBooks I had published so far before adding more in the spring. I made around $100 net in Amazon sales for a 30 day period. Not bad.

The eBook Workshop

From my short summary I hoped you picked up on some of the simple steps to creating an eBook but if not then here is what I’ll be covering.

Selecting Your Passion
Writing About Your Passion
Formatting Your Finished Content
Creating a Digital Cover
Publishing the eBook & Cover

Step 1: Selecting Your Passion

As you saw in my example, I had to decide what passion I wanted to write about before I began. Think over different things you like to do and come up with a list of possible ideas you could see yourself writing an eBook about. Once you’ve selected your passion create a mind map of all the pieces that relate to that passion that you might want to include in your eBook.

For example, if you were to write about fitness you would need to think up several topics to write about that your audience would be looking for solutions to. Here’s a possible list:

Fitness definition = introduction
Fitness workouts = possible different chapters or all listed in the same chapter
Fitness diet = its own section of the book
Fitness outfit/attire = its own section of the book
Fitness stretches = its own section of the book and probably near the beginning
Fitness tools = mentioned in chapters that the tools relate to as well as a list or worksheet of them at the end of the eBook

You could go on and add to this list but this is a quick example of a mind map/list that plans out your thoughts on what topics to cover regarding your passion you’ve selected and where you may include them in your eBook.

Once you’ve mapped out your plan you’ll most likely need to do a little research depending on how well you know about all the topics relating to your passion. If you’re an expert then you can jump right in and begin working on your book but usually as you start writing an eBook you’ll discover things you need to research so that you know how to explain them or add on to them for your audience to understand clearly.

Step 2: Writing About Your Passion

Now you’ve laid the foundation so it’s time to get to work creating the content.

Open Word, Notepad, or whatever platform you have that you’ll be using to write your content on.

I use Word often as well as Evernote.

Create a rough draft table of contents to use to guide you in writing the content for your eBook as it will act as a template to follow and make it easier on you to know when and where to talk about specific aspects of your passion.

When writing your book break it down into sections/chapters and give them each their own document file in Microsoft Word or whatever program your using so that you aren’t overwhelmed writing it all at once in one big chunk. This way you can jump around writing different sections of the eBook out of order and at the end piece them all together.

You’ll want to use images, headers, different font sizes and colors, bold font, and more to make your book appealing and not monotone boring chunks of text. Also make sure to use appropriate paragraph lengths depending on the type of eBook you are writing. If it’s an information guide like this webpage then break the text up into small paragraphs as you can see me doing.

Long blocks of text make a reader lose interest and start skimming to get through the super long and boring paragraphs. Images also keep your eBook exciting and retain your reader’s attention. In our fitness example, we would include images of different workouts, foods, tools, etc to make our content better and help our reader understand what the text is talking about since it’s difficult to describe a fitness workout sometimes.

Once all of the content has been written, whether its a 1,000 word eBook or a 20,000 word eBook, then it’s time to put the finishing touches on. Combine all of your chapters and sections into one document and make sure it all flows together properly.

Step 3: Formatting Your eBook

Once you upload your book to an eBook platform like Kindle it will distort the formatting and look different that it did in your word document. This is because different devices read text different and have different screen sizes. Therefore here is a list of DO NOTS to consider when formatting your eBook:

Page numbers – these will differ in the final product
Table of Contents shouldn’t contain page numbers
Tabs and multiple spaces
Text boxes

You will want to use Heading 1 and Heading 2 to format chapter titles and sub-headings. Bullets should work fine on the final products format so you can use those as well. Select fonts that are easy to read such as Arial or Georgia and select a font size of 12 or so for the main body content. Too small of font will be hard for viewers to read and too large of font could annoy readers by having to spend more time scrolling pages since not as many words fit on the screen if it’s large text. Also be sure to use spell checker and proof read your final draft a few times to make sure you’ve caught all mistakes and grammatical errors.

Now your file should be ready to convert to an eBook format such as “1997-2004 .doc text” or “rich text format (rtf)” but you should do more research on eBook formatting on your own if you have questions about what may or may not get distorted when converted over to an eBook file type.

Use Google to do a search for a “Word document to eBook conversion” tool and a list of conversion tools should come up. Check out the different websites that come up in the search results until you find one that allows you to upload your file and it will convert it for you. You may even decide to download a free program that converts for you such as Calibre.

Once your document is converted you can look at it and make sure your book is still formatted properly and not all distorted and visually out of sync. I had this problem with my golf book because I manually inserted a bunch of spaces to build a table for listing drills and it turned out ugly causing me to have to use excel to make a table and paste it into my document.

You can also attempt to upload your word document to Amazon Kindle Publishing if you elect to use them and they have a preview tool that allows you to see the finished formatting of your book so you get a feel of how Kindle users, iPhone users and others will see your content on their device.

Step 4: Publishing Your eBook

Go onto Amazon Kindle Publishing’s website https://kdp.amazon.com and you’ll see this screen here

As you can see they even offer a quick video for you to watch explaining how to upload your file to their publishing platform. Next you’ll want to create an account if you don’t have one already so that you can begin uploading your book.

Once you have an account you’ll see your dashboard. This happens to be my dashboard and there is my famous eBook that sold secretly behind my back. At the time of writing this page it is my only published eBook on Amazon Kindle but I have a few more that are about to get uploaded. One is the Struggling Landlord guide to becoming a landlord that you saw on the home page being used for the eBook Creation section image.

Click the add new title button and you’ll be taken to the upload page. Fill out the basic information it requests from steps 1-4. Then step 5 is where you’ll upload a cover image.

Step 5: Create a Cover for Your eBook

You can create a cover on your own using word, power-point, or some type of photo shop program. Go onto Google Images and type in “eBook cover” to get a feel for how different eBook covers are laid out and designed by other people. Also, utilize Amazon’s Kindle eBook website looking around at different published books and their covers. Once you have a design idea or layout then create your cover and save it as an image file such as pgn or jpg. Then upload it. You can also use Amazon’s cover creator which you can see the button for in the image above.

Your final step is to upload the actual content file that will be formatted into an eBook by clicking the browse button in step 6 of the upload process.

How to Price Your eBook?

You’ll be able to set your price at some point and depending on how much you charge will affect how large of a royalty you’ll earn per sale. Amazon has a 35% royalty and a 70% royalty they pay you per book sale so check out the price requirements for each. Usually if you want to price your book at your own price then you have to take the 35% royalty but abiding by Amazon’s suggestion price range can snag you a 70% royalty. Since my golf book is only $9.97 (and may be cheaper in the future if I lower it) I get 70% royalty rate.

Where Else Can I Publish My eBook?

Amazon isn’t the only site to publish your eBook to. You can search around for other sites and read their royalty rates but I only have experience with Amazon Kindle Publishing so therefore it’s the only site I feel qualified to talk about and recommend.

I would recommend starting your own website though because you can promote it their to your audience and receive a higher percentage of profits since most 3rd part hosting merchants will only charge a small 1% to 5% payment processing fee for running your customers payment method and delivering the eProduct download to them.

Hope this page helps get you off to starting you own eBook and earning some income from it. If you take a day to write a quick 20 page eBook and spend a few days making an eye grabbing cover then I believe you’ll be successful and see some sales. The cover is crucial so don’t skimp on it.

Then as I just mentioned above, you should create a website to drive traffic to and funnel to your eBook as well for additional sales. The more traffic you get to your website through social media marketing and connecting with other bloggers online, the more income you’ll potentially make from selling your eProducts.

Read: How to Create a Website Tutorial

Resources

For more tips, tools, and time-savers, visit our Resources Section through the menu bar at the top of the page or access each of our resource pages through these individual links:

Be great today,

Nick Foy

P.S. Thanks for reading and if you subscribe now to my newsletter below then you’ll receive my FREE eBook I’m giving away to my subscribers that I should be selling for a high price due to all the life changing financial knowledge I’ve packed it. Being a part of my email community you’ll also get access to great weekly content and updates from me on my passive income building efforts. Subscribe now!

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