YouTube Video Proofs That You Could Still Earn Just From Ebook Sales

Printed books still account for a large part of the book market and audiobooks are the fastest growing book segment. Although print, audiobook and ebook sales have grown, the ebook market is seemingly losing its luster among book readers.

The reason for the lackluster performance of ebooks is generally attributed to two things. The first one is that readers are still attract to the physical allure of printed books. Many readers find delight in being able to hold a physical book especially if it is bound in a beautiful way.

The second reason could be attributed to audiobooks. When ebooks first appeared, many book experts predict that they would cause the demise of the printed book because of their convenience.

However, even before ebooks gained a strong hold on the market, audiobooks stole the limelight from them. Audiobooks have the convenience of not needing to be read but only listened to.

So, should you abandon writing a book for the ebook market? This question is hard to answer as there are not many articles or videos online that could be found as conclusive proof that it is still profitable to publish only in the ebook market. However, I found a few.

Criteria Used To Select The Videos

There are many articles and videos online where the creator of the article or video stated what income they earned from book publishing. Most of the of the publishing income however is a combination of print, ebook and audiobook income.

There are only a handful of articles or videos where I can determine that the author’s income came from ebook sales alone. I have made a link to these videos as well summaries and additional information.

I made the summaries in case you cannot be bothered to watch the videos because at times they just ramble along with unrelated subjects. I have also added more information to give you a better idea of the videos.

1st Video: The Author Who Earns Approximately $50,000 A Month

Video Link: How I Make $50,000 PER MONTH Writing Books Online

The video length is more than 13 minutes long, but most of the information you need is at the first part of the video. You could stop watching when the author starts to discuss his finance question with the host of the video which is Graham Stephan.

Before we begin to discuss the video information about earning from ebook sales, let us discuss who Graham Stephan is first. He is a famous YouTube finance personality with close to 700,000 subscribers.

He has a high level of trust among the YouTube community. His finance videos are well watched. I highly recommend that you watch his videos so you can be informed on how to save and make money as well. He also checks the authenticity of the people who call him.

A Description of the Caller

I was not able to correctly get the name of the caller but as he and Graham mentioned, he is making good money from being an ebook author. His first few books were not moneymakers but this did not deter him.

Gradually, his ebooks started selling until he was able to earn in a month what he would have earned in a year from his normal job. So it is safe to assume that he was only making close to $50,000 a year in his normal job before he quit.

LitRPG And Isekai

One is important though is the information that he is making a lot of money writing books in the LitRPG and Isekai category. Isekai is a Japanese term which means a story that is centered on the protagonist of the story being transported into an alternate world/reality.

LitRPG meanwhile is a term for stories where the main protagonist is transported to a world based on games, especially fantasy video games. By the way, LitRPG stands for “Literature RPG” or “Literature Role Playing Games”.

It could be very understandable why the author is making good money writing such ebooks. video games are popular especially those that depict fantasy worlds. Many young readers of today are getting tired of old style fantasy stories and are more interested in fantasy stories that are more current.

Another reason could be the popularity of anime where there is a regular depiction of fantasy worlds. If you check the litRPG books in Amazon, you would notice that most of the covers of the books depict anime images.

Additional Information

The author also writes in series. This is a common strategy of many authors to write a book in series. This has the advantage of building on the strength on the old books they have written.

Usually, the first book in the series is sold at a cheap price or is given away for free in order to attract a following. Once, the first book has attracted enough readers, the author writes other books and raises their prices as well.

This is the strategy employed by Lindsay Buroker in almost all her books. She is a full-time fantasy fiction author and is active in YouTube. It is advisable to watch her videos if you are an aspiring fantasy fiction author.

Do not think that only smalltime and relatively famous authors use this strategy. Even famous bestselling authors use this strategy. For example, Stephen King has his The Dark Towers series while James Patterson has his Alex Cross series.

2nd Video: The Author Who Earned $180,000

Video Link: How Much Money Does a SELF PUBLISHED Book Earn?

The video length is almost 13 minutes. The information you need can be found throughout the entire video. She shows proof of her income in majority part of the video as well as her strategy. Towards the ending, she gave her advise on how to earn good money as an ebook author.

Who is Gracie Weis? According to her profile online, she is an online marketing coach as well as a money adviser. She teaches people on how to live a life free from the constraints of money.

I don’t know much about Gracie Weis but one thing is important about her in her video. She provided proof that she indeed earned a lot of money publishing only ebooks. If you watched her video, she clearly stated that her books are only available in ebook format.

How Did She Do It?

According to her video, in 2016 she published 33 ebooks in Amazon. You might be wondering how anyone can write 33 books in one year. If you guessed it right, then the answer to the question is because she used ghostwriters.

It is up to you to decide what you think about ghostwriters writing a book. The important thing however, is that she has been successful in producing books using ghostwriters. She mentioned that although she used ghostwriters to write the books, she still has to do most of the important tasks.

She created the outline of the books as well as the instructions in writing the book for the ghostwriters to follow. She also proofread the books once they were finished and made the necessary corrections. She was also responsible for marketing the books herself.

The Results Speak For Themselves

As she stated, she earned $180,000 the year she published and marketed the 33 books. When she stopped marketing the books or due to customer reception, her books sales fell incredibly low from their high sales figures.

However, she still makes more than $1,000 a month even though she basically does nothing to promote her books anymore. So, by doing a lot of work for one year, she not only earned a lot of money but continues to earn passive income even until today.

Her Tips

Write books you have Passion for and Expertise: She says that if you are not passionate about the book you are writing, you may find the task of writing it boring and you might not finish it or have substandard work.

Also, if you have no expertise in what you are writing, you might find it hard to write and this might cause you again not to finish it or do substandard work. This is sound advise for any undertaking anyone does.

Build a Niche: According to her, the only way you could continue attracting your current followers/readers is by not confusing them by writing in several niches. Know your niche and stick to it. This is her advise.

Build an Email List: She is not the only one who recommends this. Many people involved in digital businesses advise that in order to generate reliable income, one should build an e-mail list as early as possible.

Book Length is Important: She advises that your books should at least be in the range of 100 to 200 pages. I can attest to this. 100 pages is way too thin to be considered a “decent” book while 200 can be seen as a book filled with hyperbole.

Multiple Streams of Income:She also advises this due to the instability of the income of a digital based business. However, one can take note that your ebook can be converted into other forms of digital products.

The contents of your ebook can be converted to a blog, a course, a digital slide presentation and so on. This means that from one ebook, you can have multiple sources of revenue if you reformat it the correct way.

3rd Video: The Author Who Almost Makes Six Figures

Video Link: How to Make 6 Figures Publishing on Kindle (with 5-10 books)

The video is nearly 17 minutes in length. This is another video from Gracie Weis. This time she talks about three authors that are making good money in Amazon with their books. Her title is z a bit misleading as the authors she mentioned has each more than 10 books in Amazon.

The video is long but her first example which is about author Damon Zahariades is enlightening. She used KDPSpy to check the income of the authors in Amazon. Damon has 13 books which are all ebooks. According to her, he makes close to six figures with his ebooks.

The next two author’s income as related to ebook only sales is unclear. Yet, their marketing methods are similar to Damon. Even their books are similar. They all write about non-fiction books that are all about self-help. The last author writes about online and home based businesses.

Tips From These Authors:

Same advice as before: Write a series of books, Collect emails, write books you have passion and expertise in…

Self-Help books are popular in ebook format: This is also written in many ebook analysis articles.

Promote your other books and products in each of your book’s promotional Amazon page: This is like using Amazon as your own marketing landing page. Your products could be your courses, webinars, blogs and so on.

Give free gifts in exchange for emails: This doesn’t need to be necessarily expensive. You could use your free ebooks as gifts.

What About People Who Have No Direct Access To Amazon?

To any authors who are not Americans or who live outside of America, one thing you would soon find out is that Amazon is very restrictive to non-American authors. There is the matter of the hard registration process as well as the high taxes imposed to non-American authors.

This is entirely not the fault of Amazon however, they are just following the American government’s business laws. However, for many non-American authors, it is nearly impossible to sell your books directly to Amazon.

Book Aggregators

There is no doubt that Amazon is the biggest book market around and you as an author could be missing a lot of sales if you do not publish your books in it. But there could be a solution in the form of Book Aggregators.

You can simply publish your book to Book Aggregators such as Smashwords, Draft2Digital, Publish Drive and so on. They then would submit your books to the different book stores around like Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, Google Books and so on.

Draft2Digital

Not all book aggregators submit your books to Amazon. But I know one that does. It is Draft2Digital. So a solution to your problems of not being able to directly sell your books to Amazon is by submitting your books instead to Draft2Digital.

One thing you should consider though is that by submitting to Draft2Digital, you limit your access to may of Amazon book selling features such as book promotions and Amazon ad bundling.

4th Video: An Author Who Makes Nearly $3,000 A Month On Draft2Digital

Video Link: Making $2,980 From Draft2Digital Monthly Possible? (The Truth)

The video length is nearly 6.5 minutes. Although Tommy Kok, the presenter and book author has an accent. His English is good. There is not much information on how he was able to earn approximately $3,000 per month from his more than 100 books.

According to him, his nonfiction books are about yoga and meditation. He advises that you should not bundle your books together as some sort of a promotional sale as Draft2Digital would not like it.

There is not much about his video because it is short. But the important thing is that he is proof that you can earn money even though you are not directly linked to Amazon. In case you are wondering, the sales figure he showed is from his Draft2Digital income dashboard.

Conclusion

Even though print and audiobooks seem to be the future of book publishing, there is still good money that could be made from ebooks. One thing good about ebooks is that they are very easy and cheap to produce as compared to print and audiobooks.

As the videos have proven, there are many production and marketing strategies you can do to earn good money from your ebooks. Key strategies include writing about subjects you are passionate and knowledgeable about, building an email list and aggressive marketing.

If you have no direct access to the Amazon e-commerce book store which is the biggest book market in the world, do not feel disheartened. There are other avenues where you can market your books globally. One of these is via book aggregators such as Draft2Digital.

Do You Want to Sell E-Books?.