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?

Yeah, obviously there are tons of variables that go into it's success, but the writing process isn't difficult, and that's what people are somehow thinking. It's very easy to pay people to write ****. Saying, "Why wouldn't they just write their own eBooks and be gazillionaires?" is like wondering why journalists write for a newspaper or some ****. Some people only want a part of the writing process.

It won't work, you're right. If you pay $150 for a book, it will suck. If you pick your topic amazingly well and are a good designer and do the cover yourself, you might be able to pull this off for the first month or two until you get some bad reviews. Then you're f'ed.

Yeah my hunch is that anyone who thinks this is in for a big surprise. The marketing alone on social media channels is a full-time job if he wants to do it right, especially nowadays where it seems that every IMer and his grandmother is trying to make a buck with a Kindle book and spamming social media channels about it.

Getting a quality following on FB/Twitter/etc is going to be time consuming, as is getting them to actually read the tweet/post and then click to buy the book. Using social media to generate sales is very time consuming and frustrating because most people don't give a **** and the noise is extremely high.

I guess if he has $150 to burn and lots of free time, why not. I'm sure I'd learn a lot by doing it (and maybe I'll give it a try). But I think realistically the hourly is going to be worse than single tabling a $.02 sng because most of what I've read on other forums shows that most people aren't making more than couch change on Kindle.

Also, personally, I wouldn't trust cheap online freelance writers to write an entire book for me. Some crappy 500 word articles for SEO purposes? Maybe. A book to sell on Amazon, where people post reviews and what not? No.

I mean, I don't know much about it. But all you have to do is take an Econ 101 class to know that's probably horse****. In the Information Age, opportunities are:

Well-known
Profitable
Simple in execution

Pick two.

Now I'm getting an itch to write a book and try this out. Damn you twoplustwo.

edit: I bet threads on this site would be easy to convert to books. I could take the steak thread in OOT, do some editing, and voila! I have a book on cooking great steaks.

Or I could use the tried and true formula of making money by writing a book on how to make money writing a book.

Like I said, you can find experts on said field to write stuff for you at a decent price. There's tons of people who blog for free and then get picked up by sites. Half of the SB Nation are cases like that. And they get paid a pittance.

Some people love to write!

Kyle,

You could probably write a 150 book on weightlifting tips or baseball tips or managing your wife's posting access or some **** in like a week. Sell it for $9.99 and market it to similar blogs AND LET THE CASH ROLL IN MY FRIEND!

Already writing a book. 250+ pages.

If you guys want to listen to the podcast on the topic here is the link.. http://onlineincomelab.com/session022/#.. I don't know about the guy being interviewed but the owner of the site Trent has been pretty honest with how he handles his business and site. The guy on the podcast apparently after 4 months was making $1000 per month with his 8 books and I didn't see how anything he said was far fetched at all, seemed straight forward and doable.

I'm just going by what this guy has said plus other people in other communites that are doing ok with it and slowly book by book building a nice passive income. How long will it last? I don't have a clue, but for Kindle it does not take many sells to get a decent enough rank to sell 10-20 books per month going by what I've read/heard. Extra promotion on forums or Facebook pages should also help.

As for outsourcing the books I'd say you guys are right about that unless it's for very simple topics. I'd say I'll write most of the books anyway because I work boring 12 hour shifts and can research and write about a lot of topics that I myself am intersted in.

Damn I don't care if it's not a huge moneymaker, but if I can get some books out there that brings in enough monthly to cover my car payment I'd be happy as a pig in ****.

On what?

Baseball training.

I want 20% for giving you the idea. I can meet you down near Pike Market. We'll buy Hom Bow from Mee Sum from our first check. CHEERS!

Ya ok. Maybe you can promote it!

You make money from ebooks by promoting to your followers, website visitors, rss readers, etc.

If you don't have an audience already that you can sell to, random people are not just going to magically buy your ebook.

Yeah, pretty obvious. No one searches for random eBooks on Amazon.

They find your book when going through pages under the category they are interested in or searching various topics. They don't have to search the exact book title lol

Your audience is people searching the store for ebooks on the topic/category you picked. Of course promotion and followers would help a lot but people come across your book and when it gets a few sells it ranks higher, get more sales, ranks even higher and so on.

If you do your research well, after a sale or two your book should already rank in the top 100 on the bestsellers list for that category. Researching the best sellers list is like researching the SEO on the top 10 sites in Google for your competition. There are numbers to look at to see if you can rank easily.

Again, this is not from experience but it's from what I understand so far of the process.

If your content is good then it shouldn't be hard to get a following, especially if you pick a solid niche. You guys must underestimate how many sites/blogs are out there which would love to review your $10 eBook simply by giving it to them for free.

I wish I was an expert on some cool field. The only thing I've considered is writing an eBook on properly preparing for a move. I moved furniture for about 2 years and it's unreal how much money people wind up spending extra by doing stupid things. People spend $120/hr for 3 guys to come out and wind up adding 2 hours to the bill doing silly crap. Maybe I'll give it a shot!