Good to know you’re near to breaking even. Congratulations and I hope you publish more e-books.

On the site I mentioned, I think there are several factors they have to consider in order for your work to be converted to another format:

– the audience likes it
– the website tallies the readership of the work
– I think even social media shares and mentions are a big factor too.
-The website will fund it and will have copyright once it’s released (which can hit two sides of the coin depending on the writer)

And it’s usually free. I think wattpad was made by some guy from Canada.

I know Amazon has a service also that will sell your book in printed copy form but for a bigger price. I’m not sure however if it would help sales any. I think I need more demand first 🙂

There are several websites like wattpad that if you gain a huge number of viewership will lead you to a transition from online publishing to hard copies. There are quite a number of novels there that was turned into movies and dramas already. But to be honest, the quality of the stories there are quite EH. The question here is would you sacrifice substance over profit?

Thanks, and I definitely plan to use that strategy in the near future.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I didn’t really think about leveraging existing content to create another informational product for others (even if you had to rewrite it several times). That is pretty smart.

The other smart idea is to organize information in a way that readers can easily digest. It is hard for new readers to be up to speed on items – hence an organized layout might help them immensely. I think you can probably use the content from those long blog posts, and possible turn that into another ebook at some point in the future.

Thanks EL! Hopefully I start to get the hang of it and make some more sales!

The strategy behind offering the eBook for free is to get more downloads and (hopefully) more positive, verified reviews. My initial price point of $2.99 was based on the minimum price you could charge to get a 70% royalty and the fact that pretty much EVERY other book was already at this price. Being a new book from an unknown author, it would not have made sense to charge $10 for my eBook when to the common viewer there is so much competition at a lower price.

Should I have published this information as blog post(s)? That’s an interesting question:

1) Actually this book started as a collection of 10 of my favorite blog posts from the last few years. Though each chapter was heavily re-written from its original form, the main ideas still exist within my blog articles. Although randomly placed, they are there if you know where to find them.

Part of this eBook experiment was to see if “structuring” this information in a more concise and outlined way would produce higher sales and returns. I’ve often read that when people design eCourses, its really nothing more than just a syllabus of information that they’ve already published in other places. BUT because you’re organizing it all for someone else in a way where they don’t have to go digging for it, that’s where you create perceived value for the customer.

2) I actually wrote an eBook last year but decided to publish it as a mega blog post. Although the post has generated a little revenue, it still ranks terrible on Google despite my efforts to promote it / create backlinks.

So this eBook is a little bit like trying things the other way: To see if actually publishing an eBook rather than a blog post produces better residual income over time.

Amazon does give you the option to offer the book in print, but I really haven’t looked into it much. I suppose I may test that strategy out at some point.

Despite my attempt, I am somewhat optimistic that eBooks could be a helpful contribution to my passive income streams. Looking at the sales figures for a lot of writers, its pretty amazing to see them post four and five figure months.