Making Money From Book Summaries and Reviews

There are many book lovers and even non-book lovers have to read books for school work. Safe to say but if you know how to read you have seen and read a book. However not many people today have a lot of time to read books. Book summaries and book reviews media products exists to fulfil this consumer need.

BOOK SUMMARIES

You Have to Get the Author’s Permission

First things firs: If you summarise the book of an author then you have to pay the author copyright fees under the laws. If the book is in the public domain then you do not have to pay copyright fees as books in the public domain already have expired copyrights and can be used for whatever purposes by anyone.

So it is clear to say that unless you get legal permission from the author there is a likelihood that you could be sued later for copyright infringement especially if your book summary becomes famous and earns money. So at the outset you could be already spending a lot of money for your media content business.

Publishing Consultant Jane Friedman has a good article regarding book copyrights and fair use in her article titled A Writer’s Guide to Fair Use and Permissions + Sample Permissions Letter.

In her long article one of the things she reiterated just like me is if you are summarising a book for commercial purposes you would most certainly get slapped with a copyright fee from the author as against using their work for other purpose like charity work. Her article is a definite must read as it includes a sample permission letter that you can send to an author.

If you have limited funds to pay copyright fees to the author Outright you could persuade them to accept payment After you have actually earned some money from their book. This could be in the form of income sharing where the author of the book gets a percentage of the total income from their book. With this setup you and the book author share a similar fate regarding the success or failure of the business.

A Sampler of the Industry

I would not go to the details of example online sites that offer such services but if for example you Google the search keywords book summary websites plenty of articles and websites of companies that offer such services would be on top of the search list so you should have no problem.

One of the top companies offering such services is getAbstract. This is a company based in Lucerne, Switzerland and specialises in books related to business. They have a subscription based revenue model and they have several tiers of pricing.

Another online company and also one of the biggest is goodreads which is located in the US. They have a community building strategy in building a customer base which allows for the sharing of informations such as comments and reviews from member to member. They monetise their website in a number of ways like by showing ads and by book affiliate marketing.

An Upstart in Germany

Out of chance I happen to come to the Four Minute Books website. Based on what I read about the author and his description of his website he primarily setup his website as a one man company. He read all the books to which he has written summaries and did a couple of hundreds in such a short time.

He is a writer by trade but in totality is involved in the writing and publishing business. He is based in Germany and a German but this did not hamper his command for the English language. So he sets a good example for anyone who wishes to create media content in the English language even though their native language is not English.

I do not know how English is widely adapted in Germany but one thing I can definitely be sure about is that by reading English books and making summaries of them he got more proficient with English if he has not already been good before. Take note also that English is one of the most popular languages used online.

He offers both free and premium products and services. He offers free book summaries as a default but you can upgrade to a premium account where you get more information regarding the books. He also offers audiobooks. He also markets his own book related services as well as his own books.

This business model is very appropriate for a person who likes to be in the world of writing and reading especially in reading books and writing their own books.

Can You Read and Understand More Than One Book Per Day?

One issue that I found interesting is how he has managed to read almost two (2) or even more books a day. Anyone can read a book in a short time but understanding a book in a short time like in a few hours is totally debatable. There are many factors associated with this like the length of the book and how rich is the content.

There are many books that are very long but are full of unnecessary fluff. Many books also overestimate the learning level of their readers and bore them with such common information that the readers just skip these paragraphs and even entire chapters. Being a book reader myself and from what I gather from many of the book forums I researched I determined that many readers book-browsing.

This means that just like the behaviour of people towards searching online book readers also tend to read the first few parts of the book and then ultimately browse the book to see if the book is worth reading in its entirety. This is why book summaries as a product exist. There are people who can credibly browse through a book and get the necessary information needed to make an educated summary of the book.

For example I have read many self-help and selling books that I am already familiar with the concepts of what almost all of them similarly inform. The concepts of the books might have been told in a new way but any avid book reader of the same genre can grasp the message of the book without much detailed reading.

The conclusion is that even though you are a one person business you can offer a book summary business and create a high volume of book summary media content.

Where Do You Get the Books?

Another thing you would have to consider is where do you get the budget for the books you would be reading? If you have a lot of money or even just have a small budget you can afford books today especially e-books. Many books cost less than a dollar today and many are even bundled together that they are almost free.

You can also get into your local library and borrow books for you to read and summarise. This is especially helpful knowing that there are many physical books not available online. You can also buy books from stores that sell secondhand books. The added advantage of this is that you may chance upon a collectible book that you can sell for a good profit.

BOOK REVIEWS

Unlike book summaries you do not have to pay the original author copyright fees. However make sure that you reference a very small part only of the book as your source material otherwise you could be slapped with a copyright infringement notice by the author. Researching online on forums I saw some references on how much you can legally take out from the book.

The answers range from a few paragraphs from different parts of the entire book. Clear violations are copying an entire chapter of a book and more. These forum answers came from lawyers who have worked on similar copyright infringement notices to people who actually work in the book industry. I suggest you do further research as I am not a lawyer myself.

I would not go through the examples of actual online sites that do these media content. You can simply Google the search keyword “best book review sites” and a list of articles as well as online sites that offer such services would already appear.

One online site that you could research is LibraryThing. This site also takes the community building strategy in building a consumer base. They offer many services related to their community of readers which include book information sharing and the sharing of books.

I have not seen ads on their sites but they informed in one of their articles that they do show random ads to visitors. They used to charge membership fees but scrapped it since March 2020. The only way I see them earning is via book affiliate marketing where some of their links would go to Amazon and other e-commerce sites.

You could use this approach in your book review business if you decide to have one. You could build a community where people can review books and interact with each other and make an income through ads, affiliate marketing, merchandise and other online revenue sources.

One thing to note is that there are already many well established online companies offering this service and if you are a small company even a one person business it might be hard to get consumers off these sites and into your site. One of the common ways small businesses fight big and well established competitors is to niche down on one or several niches.

For example if you want to compete with a business fiction or non-fiction book company you can niche down to success stories or books with specific industry descriptions. This way you would appeal to business minded people who are tired with the theoretical part of business and want actual information of how to succeed in business in real world conditions and examples.

EVERYTHING ABOUT BOOKS IN VIDEO FORMAT

If you search YouTube for the search keywords “book summaries” and “book reviews” you would see a lot of YouTubers have videos for a specific book or a group of books. There are even channels dedicated to book summaries. Again this area of generating income through book summaries and reviews is already crowded. There are even free audiobooks in Youtube which are very hard to compete with.

If there is one thing I learned about the digital content business is that you are mainly playing a long game. I made several YouTube videos before and after a while stopped. Checking them today I noticed that the viewers numbers were still very low but they have increased. These are videos I made a couple of years ago. If I had continued then I would be in a better position now.

You could review the book themselves. For example I see book review videos about children’s books. They take minutes to read to as an adult and even for literate children. You can easily make a lot of videos without reading a book for hours first. I even saw children reviewing such children’s books and they get decent viewer numbers.

Imagine if you can upload such kinds of videos several times a week using yourself or a child to review the book. Reviewing the book in this case does not mean only the contents of the book but also the cover, the fonts, the illustrations and other things that make up a book. Parents and children are one of the most profitable consumer niche so you should give this idea a serious thought.

CONCLUSION

The biggest concern with book summaries is getting the legal permission of the author of the book. The second concern is that there are already established companies in the market and more are coming just like the book review business. When small companies or startups are faced with such a dilemma the usual thing that they do is to niche down to one or several niches.

Many book reviewers are also concentrating on the contents of the book and forgetting that there are other consumers like book collectors who may or may not care about the contents of the book but the actual physical book itself. Besides the physical books and the contents one can also offer other information such as the author themselves.

They can also offer information about the backdrop of the book. For example if the book was set in Paris they can “Cleverly” and not in a Brash manner offer products related to Paris which directly or indirectly correlates to the book. If a book talks about machines then they can offer products that relate to machines and so on.

A book is an idea which can turn into a product. Books are full of ideas and are therefore full of products that can potentially be offered.