I got an interesting email from a long time buddy showing me a screenshot from Amazon of an eBook he created hitting the top 50 on the Kindle list (and made more than $10,000!) last month! Even more interesting is that he has never been a good writer himself! After a lot of pushing he finally admitted that he didn't write the book but paid a freelance writer to write for him. I wasn't able to find out the exact amount he had paid for the writing job. But he did say he had fully recovered his investment two weeks after uploaded his book to the Amazon e-book publishing platform!
Isn't this a real window of opportunity for making money?
According to statistics from the February 2011 Sales Report by Association of American Publishers, eBooks rank as #1 format among all trade categories. For the February results, eBooks have enjoyed triple-digit percentage growth, 202.3%, vs February 2010. Even Yahoo! eBooks reported that they are poised to have a 4x increase in eBook sales during the next 2 years. See video below:
And interestingly, Amazon announced that their Kindle book sales have finally eclipsed print books sales. Amazon now sells 105 electronic books for every 100 printed ones. This is a sign of the growing dominance of their Kindle digital reader
, currently the company's best-selling electronic device. This will be a major shift for Amazon -- They have been selling printed books for more than 15 years vis-a-vis ebooks for less than four years. This is the time to jump on the trend because there are 9,000,000 prints books on Amazon but only 950,000 eBooks. (That's a measly 1/10 the competition with tons of genres wide open for the taking.)
For those who love writing or who can write well, this is a HUGE opportunity to make money. Even if you cannot write or hate writing you can still jump on the bandwagon just like my friend did (outsource the writing part).
How to go about publishing an eBook at Amazon?
First thing first, go to Amazons Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and sign up for an account. It costs nothing.
If you plan to sell a lot of eBooks, it's advisable for you to figure out a way to upload your eBook files directly to the KDP platform, IF you're a do-it-yourself kind of person.
You can create your own book cover and format your ebook from a Microsoft Word file. There's a free software tool you can use to do the job - Mobipocket eBook Creator which allows you to create an ebook with a table of contents and then convert it to AZW, Amazon's proprietary Kindle ebook format. This is the process:
Microsoft Word file ==> HTML ==> MOBI
MOBI is the file output by Mobipocket, which is the SAME as AZW.
You can find out more from the Mobipocket official website.
If you can't do it yourself and need help, click here.
A few words of caution:
Read the Kindle Publishing Guide thoroughly. Don't be tempted to use public domain titles (PLRs) in their original forms because Amazon is currently implementing a new standard policy to eliminate the problem caused by multiple, undifferentiated copies of public domain titles in their Kindle catalog. You don't want your name blacklisted. However, you may make use of any public domain material as a reference to come up with your own version of eBook - rewriting the content, changing the graphic and book title, etc.
Here are a couple of useful guides you can use to speed up your whole process of making money with Kindle Book Publishing:
Kindle Publishing Made Easy : A Step-by-Step Guide to publishing your books and ebooks in the Amazon Kindle Store
The Kindle Cash Machine : Publish Your Own Book Today And Start Generating Sales On Amazon Fast and Make Real Money In the Process
Tags: Kindle Amazon Kindle Book Publishing eBook
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