Do You Want to Sell E-Books?

There are many aspiring writers who want to write their own books and with the popularity of self-publishing this has become very easy. All you have to do is write your book in a word processor and convert the file into the required e-book format. You can then upload this file to an e-commerce store or to your own website where you can sell it online.

Could You Profitably Make Money Selling E-Books?

Let us tackle the most important question first: Can you profitably make money selling e-books? I think one of the best answer came from the article of Carrie Kirby on 1 July 2016 titled Can You Really Make a Living as an Ebook Writer? Although the article is a little dated we should note that e-book publishers have increased tremendously and there is fierce competition for e-book buyers.

This means that all in all there is less customer for each e-book publisher and maybe even none. It is not unusual for an e-book publisher to have no sales at all for their e-book.

Going back to Carrie Kirby’s article on her paragraph titled ”Will You Make Money?” she stated that of the approximately 200,000 authors selling ebooks on Amazon only about 5,000 or less than 3% consistently earn $10,000 a year or more. She also stated that more than half of them are traditionally published authors. So only around 1% of all the self-publishers are making money if you can consider it money at all.

It is assumed that almost all the self-publishers in Amazon come from first world countries especially America where the cost of living is high. $10,000 is not even minimum wage in these countries. So one conclusion we can make is that self-publishing e-books as a replacement for your day job income is very unlikely.

Another conclusion that we can make is that you may not make any money at all or even lose capital in self-publishing your own e-book. Lastly, unless you are a traditionally published author it would be again very hard to break into the self-publishing business. Creating and selling an e-book is easy. The hard part is getting people to buy your e-book.

Another thing we can consider is that Google estimates that as of August 2010, there are 129,864,880 books in existence. The source is Mal Warwicks Blog On Books. They also reported that 3,000,000 books alone were produced in 2011. This and more information are available in their article Would you believe how many books are published every year in the U.S.?.

Perhaps the most enlightening article produced about the difficulty of selling an e-book or any book for that matter is an article from Berrett-Koehler Publishers titled The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing. The article remarked that most US books sell less than 200 books a year and less than 1,000 during its lifetime.

I strongly suggest you read their article if ever you are interested in publishing your e-book or book especially if you are from the US. There are still many articles online which details the difficulty of making a living or even a little money with being an author. Even if you visit popular forum sites like Quora you get similar messages from people who know.

What is the Common Answer?

By now you know that the common answer is that for the most of us we cannot make money selling books and e-books. Only a few make it to have decent even a living standards income from becoming an author. This is not at all surprising since the barrier to entry for the business especially for e-books is very low. This results in cutthroat competition which few survive.

If You Really Want to Try…

If you really want to publish your e-book I suggest that first you do not give up your main source of income. Create your e-book on as little capital as you can and on the free time available to you. Many in the industry say that your first e-books are not likely to sell because for one you are not a known author.

Authors who have established names tend to earn more. Just like in any business the companies or individuals who become more familiar to customers tend to get bigger the more famous they become and as they get more famous they become even bigger. Such examples are heavyweight authors Stephen King and J.K. Rowling that other authors tend to imitate their work.

Where Can You Sell/Buy Your Ebooks?

There are many online platforms for selling/buying books and e-books most notably now the big e-commerce sites. For example in North America particularly the US there are Amazon and Apple Books. In Asia I found that e-commerce sites Lazada and Shopee are now also selling e-books.

These e-commerce sites are owned predominantly by Chinese and Singaporean companies with Asia wide operations. Sales of e-books by the way in Asia is rising but so are the publishers. Also, it is possible to buy e-books from Amazon even though you are in Asia. So expect greater competition for e-book sales in the Asia Market.

There are still other online book publishing platforms such as Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. For more detailed information you can Google “online book publishing platforms” and you would see a list of these online book publishers. Amazon however accounts for more than 80% of the total e-book purchases in the US so they are very important.

If you want to sell e-books in Amazon it is easy if you are an American. All you need to do is register and provide some information including your financial details like taxation and payment details and you are already setup to go. All you have to do is create your e-book and upload it. If you sell an e-book Amazon takes a slice of your profits just like other e-commerce platforms. Amazon can also assist you with promoting your e-book for a fee.

If you are a foreigner or a non-US citizen and you want to sell e-books to Amazon the application is a bit different and more difficult. Besides registering you also need to fill up a US tax application form especially made up for foreigners who earn a living by doing business in the US and US customers.

Be aware that Amazon would ordinarily take up 30% of your e-book sales whether you are a US citizen or not. However Amazon also holds another 30% of the earnings of foreign e-book publishers/sellers. This means that foreign e-book publishers/sellers are left with just 49% of their original profit.

The US however has reciprocal tax agreements with certain countries which means that Amazon would not hold 30% of a foreign publisher/seller’s income but only a part of it. For example Amazon would only hold 5% of the income of an Australian e-book publisher and only 15% of the income of an e-book publisher based in the Philippines.

Sell E-books from Your Website

There are obvious advantages of selling e-books from well known e-commerce platforms such as Amazon. The biggest one is that you maximise your marketing reach because many people who purchase e-books purchase it from these platforms. The greatest disadvantages are that you have to share your income and you have no control in how your e-book is marketed.

You can choose to sell your e-books directly from your own website. However this almost always entails the use of e-commerce platforms to integrate into your website. Again you have to pay the e-commerce company to provide e-commerce services to you and you have to follow their marketing policies which seems to be the same as going to the big e-commerce platforms all over again.

So study well your e-commerce plans if you intend to sell e-books from your own website. One definite advantage of using your own website is that you control the website marketing of your e-books. You can devote as much website pages to it as you want as against big e-commerce sites where you are given a limited space and compete with other e-book sellers for customer views.

Submit Your Short Stories to Online Short Story Publications

Another thing you can do is to create short stories. They require a lesser investment in capital and time unlike creating e-books. You can also sell these short stories as e-books in big e-commerce platforms or you can sell these short stories to online publications that produce short stories.

Again I would not delve into the details of selling short stories online. Suffice to say that there are plenty of online sites that do accept short story submissions. If you for example Google “where to sell your short stories” there would be plenty of articles that would provide information. Many even give out a list of online sites to submit to.

Post Stories in Your Own Website or Blog

This method is especially helpful for writers who want to primarily produce their own content. They can post short stories in their blog and monetise it the same way you do any website. I have even heard of authors posting complete books as samples of their work online. This has the added effect of creating a body of work or portfolio which one can monetise in terms of products and services related to writing.

YouTube as an E-Book/Audiobook Resource

With video increasingly dominating the method of delivering digital content many authors have become imaginative and found new ways of selling their stories. There are now audiobooks which comes in audio and audio & text. There are even stories that come complete with animations.

These are especially appealing to customers who may want to view video content one day or just hear audio content the next day for the same digital product. There are also videos and blogs of book summaries as well as author lifestyle blogs. All of this could be extensions of your e-book products.

Book Piracy

As if making money from physical and digital books is not hard enough authors also have to contend with their products being pirated. This is a global problem and one an upcoming successful author would likely encounter. In YouTube alone there exists many audiobooks that are pirated. Although sometimes the author can get compensated by Google it is not always the case.

There are also many counterfeit physical books being sold online and out in physical brick and mortar stores. There are many stories alone of book stalls in Asia and Africa openly selling counterfeit books for half the price of the original one. This sort of crime may be propagating the spread of old knowledge but it definitely significantly hinders the spread of new knowledge.

Conclusion

It is very easy to produce your own e-book and sell it online but due to many factors namely the overabundant supply both of e-book and physical books the chances of an unknown author selling an e-book and making decent profit is very remote. Add to this piracy and the increasing dominance of video as a digital information product and the chances even gets slimmer.

One of the big things authors can do besides marketing their e-books is to market themselves. Afterall the contents of the e-books came from the mind of the author and we could say indirectly that the author is the product itself. An author may be famous but if the customers do not like what stories/information they are selling then they would also fail.

The author should be both an artist and a businessperson. They should study what their customers want and create a product that both they and their customers would want. In parting I would like to refresh the minds of people regarding the ending for the Game Of Thrones. It was a very divisive issue on the fans of the show and is much talked about. This is how much fans love their stories.