Posting Entire Books and Novels Online For Profit

There are already several millions of books available both in physical and digital format. The internet has also made it possible for any author to directly sell their books to readers. The conventional way for authors to sell their books online would be to sell them in e-commerce book platforms. There are however authors who let their entire books be read online.

This means that instead of the reader having to buy the author’s digital book before they can read it, the entire book or novel is already available online for the reader to read it. The process of paying, downloading the digital file of the book, and then opening the digital file using a e-book reader device is eliminated.

This is very advantageous for readers as for one, they would not have to pay for digital books. If you post your entire books online, you have the advantage of attracting readers who do not want to pay for books before they have even read them.

The Obvious First Question

How do these authors then make money if they post their entire books online without asking the readers to pay for them? If you are well versed with website businesses, then you already know most of what I would be saying.

This section of the article is for those who are still unaware of how to make money with their own website. To proceed, here are some of the ways these websites can make money by posting their entire books in their website:

Online Ads

Online Ads Are Suited For Fiction Books:

The bread and butter or the most basic way website owners earn their money. Google’s Adsense program is where most website owners usually start.

Then as the pageviews and visitor numbers of a website increases, the website owner can replace Google Adsense with an online ad company that pays higher. This is what many digital business experts recommend.

In the case of fiction novels, many digital business experts specially recommend that one of your website monetization strategies be online advertising. The reason for this is because the digital content of most novels and fiction books does not strongly put emphasis on products that are being marketed for companies.

For example, website articles generally are searched for keywords. These keywords are used to determine what products are best suited to be shown in the ad section of websites. Alternatively, if the ad company does not find keywords, it bases its choice using the reader’s profile.

Like it or not, search engines collect data from us to determine how to interact with us. Using its algorithm, it determines which information to show us. This includes the ads people see. This means that if you are trying to attract your online readers to a specific product using your online novel, you would fail. You would probably earn more income using online ad companies that target online readers using their profile.

Affiliate Marketing Could Be Suited For Non-Fiction Books:

Though I haven’t seen this online or perhaps I haven’t noticed it yet, there is good potential for non-fiction books to earn money thru affiliate income. This is because it is easier to integrate affiliate marketing to non-fiction books.

Example 1: Selling Self-Improvement Books
I think the best explanation would be an example. Let us say that you want to post a complete book online about self-improvement. Just think. You couldn’t have learned about self-improvement without reading some self-improvement books yourself.

Not let us say that in a few or many paragraphs of your book you mentioned references to some of the self-improvement books you read. You can use these references as a link to book affiliate products that you are trying to sell.

You can even have an e-commerce store at then end of your online book disguised as the references section of your book. Since you already have warmed your readers to the affiliate book products you are selling thru your online book, they are more than likely to buy your affiliate products.

Example 2: Selling Financial Products
Another example would be in selling financial products. You could post an entire book online about finance. You can then mention references to the other finance books you have read and are now selling thru affiliate marketing.

You could also mention banks, forex companies, financial advise companies and so on, as long as these companies could provide you with affiliate marketing income. If you write your online book well enough, you can seamlessly integrate these companies to the information in your online book.

Example 3: Selling A Physical Product
If you think online posted books are only good for selling books and services, then you are wrong. They could also be used to sell physical products. It just depends on how you present the information.

Again, let us use an example. This time the product would be camping and outdoor equipments. The title of your online posted book could be: “Camping in the Alaskan Wilds”. The title however could be anything. I am just stating an example.

If you guessed it correctly at where I am going, you would be selling camping and outdoor equipments with your book about the Alaskan Wilds. There would be plenty of opportunities for you to repeatedly remind your readers to try and check out the affiliate products you are selling.


Non-Fiction Books Are Just Like Very Long Articles
If you have written online articles especially long ones, then you shouldn’t have problems writing non-fiction books. In fact, there are authors who have successfully sold books by just compiling the information they have written on their blogs.

Darren Rowse, the influential blogger and owner of the well-known site ProBlogger did exactly this. He published a book using materials from the blogs he has written before. It sold well.

So, it is entirely possible to make a long book entirely composed of articles you have written before. It may be entirely possible for you to rework the many articles you have written in your website into one cohesive book which could make money for you in either digital or physical format.

Donations

People Only Give When You Really Need It, If You are Lucky

There are many website that post complete educational books online. For example, if you Google search the keywords: ”physics books online free”, you would find many websites that have complete physics books online for free even to download.

For example, the website OpenStax has a complete College Physics book available online. If you check the online book, it is very exhaustive and comes complete with images and illustrations.

Many of these websites won’t show ads but would rather ask for online money donations. Does it work? I think this question is what you want to ask. Well, it depends on how you perceive this monetization method.

Online donation capabilities can easily be integrated in your website. For example, you can easily add a PayPal donation widget in your website. There is no need for yourself to create a donation software program from scratch.

If you visit a lot of non-profit websites, you would surely see that many of them are funded by charitable donations by people. But not only non-profit websites, for profit websites also ask for donations. However, even non-profit websites need to be run like a business in order to survive.

I have seen such websites as: Wikipedia, Khan Academy and even such YouTube Channels as Asian Boss ask for donations once there is a danger that their website or YouTube channel would close down due to insufficient funds to continue operating.

These websites and YouTube examples I mentioned eventually avoided closing down when people donated to them. This shows the reality of a donation based business. People usually give money to your business only when there is a danger that you would close down.

You Could Get Lucky

But a donation based business can bring in huge dollars. There are for example many rich philanthropists who donate a lot of money in education based programs. They donate to schools and universities and to any program that would improve literacy.

As a business that is donations based, these would be one of your main target customers and not only the people who actually read your online books. For example, billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla Cars fame, donated five million dollars to Khan Academy.

This is proof that a donation business works. The advantage of a donation business model is that you could target customers that do not even use your product. All you need to do is to convince people that your product is worth supporting.

The Obvious Next Question

“Can you even make money with posting your entire book online?”

This would be the Next obvious question that you would ask. As I have mentioned in the preceding article, you can make money even in a donation based business strategy.

But let us look at the most basic way of making money by posting your entire book online. Let us take the example of Wattpad who make millions of dollars in ad revenue each year and growing.

This clearly means that there is money to be made from posting your entire book online. And yes, Wattpad is a for-profit company. I just said this in case you did not know. Wattpad offers an income sharing scheme with its authors.

If your online book in Wattpad is approved for ad monetization, then whenever your online book generates ad income, you split the income between you and Wattpad. This monetization strategy is already being done by other companies similar to Wattpad.

For example, Webnovel, WebNovelOnline and similar sites all do this. If you Google the search keyword: “web novel sites” you would come across many other sites that make money by posting complete books online.

But Are These Authors Earning Money At All?

I did a cursory check at forum sites and found that most of these authors are not making any money at all. They however hope to make money someday by posting their books online.

So there is no money on these online book posting sites for authors? Not exactly, there are previously unknown authors in Wattpad for example who eventually were able to monetize their online posted books when their writing became known.

As you might know, Wattpad has been responsible for some books to become published novels, television series and even movies. This is were you would really make the big money. But be warned, many do not even make it anywhere near this stage.

However, one you reach this stage, the stage where you become popular or semi-popular as an author, the snowball of opportunity will probably keep growing even bigger and bigger.

For example, Stephen King started out as an unknown author who suffered rejection after rejection for his novels to publishing companies. Eventually, he became known for one horror novel he wrote titled “Carrie”. The rest is history.

His name as a horror author became widely known that he still sells volumes of books even today. All it took was one story. If Stephen King started out his writing career when the internet had been invented, he would have started by posting stories online for free just to get noticed.

To Get Noticed As A Writer

This would probably be the reason why you should post at least some of your complete books online for free: “Just to get noticed as a writer.” This is like you providing candy giveaways to children in the hopes that they would like your candy enough that they would buy it next time.

Does this strategy work? Of course it does. For example, there is an author by the name of Lindsay Buroker who makes her living writing fantasy books. Her books are also available as audiobooks.

If you follow her YouTube channel, you would know that she has put some of her audiobooks to YouTube. She writes books in series and she has put into YouTube some of the first books in her book series.

When she checked the results after a few months, her book sales have grown. Because of putting her first books in YouTube, people got to know her and her books and started buying them.

Conclusion

Besides making your book available to customers either as a physical book or a downloadable digital file, you could also post it completely on your website or to some online book posting company like Wattpad.

Making money from your book this way is as difficult as trying to sell it as a physical or a downloadable digital file. But what you get from it is exposure. You can use your online posted book as a gateway for your readers to know you and your writing.

This is especially helpful for authors who never gets noticed due to the increasing deluge of books brought about by the ease of creating and marketing books online.

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