I think you're f'ed then.

Just got done with a 6 week workshop class at my college. This was the result of the workshop, not super duper awesome or anything, but I am proud of it:

http://www.theaustinmunro.com/roadtrippin/main.php

Never tried yet..not motivated when it comes to these crappy sites anymore.

I'm playing with the idea of writing some Kindle ebooks on topics I am good in, and then also doing some outsourcing. From what I've been seeing it's possible to pay like $120-$150 to outsource the writing of an ebook that will make on avg. $50-$100+ per month without any worrying about SEO and Google. That's also without any extra promotion..just uploaded and forget about it basically. I'd do some promotion though such as Social Media pages and some forums on the topics.

Why would that work? How could it be possible to pay $150 for something that generates 2/3 of that in a month, every month, forever - without extra work? That makes literally no sense.

I don't understand why you think it makes no sense. You write an ebook and publish onto the Kindle store. If you do the research on your topic to see if it's likely to be profitable it should make sales. This is obviously the extremely simple version of what I am talking about but in theory this is it and I don't see why this makes no sense to you.

What have you been seeing out of interest? Do they publish sales statistics? I'd be interested to see how you do, I'm under the impression it's highly saturated and that it sounds like it's easy money which is never often the case.

Bear in mind if you outsource and entire e-book for $120-$150 it's going to be crap quality. It would suck for someone to buy an e-book that bad, it's a bit of a hustle.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on IM forums and have ran into some threads on this topic, talked to some people on other non-IM forums like this one doing it and recently listened to a podcast from one of the non-BS IM’rs out there (onlineincomelab) where he had a guy on talking about how he does it. He had about 8 books himself so far after a few months with none making below $50 per month, maybe he’s running good but he does do some research first to see if he thinks it would be decently profitable. He only wrote one of those books and the rest were outsourced.

As for the quality of the books I’ll still have to find about that. I’d pay some more $$ for better quality if I knew the profit would come in. I don’t plan on publishing any crap..I'd make sure the info is good and suits what they are looking for so I’d look into it more before I go ahead. I have a book already outlined on a topic I know quite a bit about so I’ll try it out with this one anyway.

Which IM related websites do you guys regularly read or use?

Why would the writers not take the extremely simple step of putting them on the Kindle market rather than selling them to you for 5% of their value? That is the part that makes no sense.

I'm sure a lot of them do, but on sites like Content Authority, edesk and so on there are hundreds of people that just do writing gigs as their job.

You don't hit them up like, "Hey, I'm writing an eBook that is going to generate $50 a month for years to come!"

Lots of people just write stuff for people for work, without any idea/care of what the content will be used for. You pay them to write, edit it, and repackage it into whatever you want.

If I paid someone random $150 to write a book about poker, would you ever be tempted to buy and read this book? If not, why would any other subject be any better?

Writing a book with value takes a lot of skill, a lot of time and a lot of dedication. Not $150! E-book writing services are just another shady corner of the Internet.

Poker strategy is a completely different subject than something else though. I could absolutely give someone an outline of things to expound on for a book about a separate subject and expect great results, especially if they're already familiar with it. I could definitely have someone write a 50 page book on all the variations of poker and the rules to each game, etc.

You can also pay people to do the research for you as well. Or hit up people who are well versed in the subject at hand.

I found a guy who knows all kinds of stuff about recording equipment, software, amps, etc., as it's his passion and regular gig. He said he'd write 500 words for something like .03 a word. That's a steal for an expert in a field like that. I could round them up into an eBook and make money peddling it to amateur artists.

Some people just like to write man, and if they can get paid for it, sweet.

I'm just saying it's not going to be easy. He made it sound like:

1) Pay random dude on oDesk $150
2) ???
3) Make $50/month for 27 years

Obviously there is no way there is that big of an inefficiency.

Isn't it better to write 4 books on one topic than 10 books on different topics?