Ebooks are likened to ordinary paper books, but in fact they are a lot more flexible than paper books. For instance, you could write an ebook to publicize an event say, the opening of a shop, the launch of a new gizmo or even the publication of a new book, within a couple of hours or a day and get it out working for you; whereas if you wanted to print flyers, a pamphlet or a brochure, it would take quite some time and money to do the same type of thing.
That is on the marketing front; if you just want to write a novel and publish it as an ebook, your book can be on sale within a day or two of having finished composing it. In the paper publishing world, it can take six to a dozen months or even years to get a book into the stores.
Although there is still more status to having a book accepted by a traditional publisher, there is actually more reward per ebook sold than per paper book and Amazon reports a number of authors having sold more than a million units of their ebook through Amazon. This difference in revenue is surprising. look at the numbers, assuming sales of one million units:
Traditional Publisher: book price: $20; writer’s cut: 6%; sales: 1,000,000 = 20 x 0.06 x 1,000,000 = $1,200,000
Amazon eBook: book price: $10; writer’s cut: 70%; sales: 1,000,000 = 10 x 0.7 x 1,000,000 = $7,000,000
Notice the difference in price. It is probable that you will sell more ebooks at $10 than books at $20, so the profits are likely to be even higher. It shows that there is a huge new potential earnings stream for aspiring author/publishers.
However, take into account this. If your ebook is a novel set in, say, Thailand, you could insert a travel link for Thailand in the bottom margin of every page and that link would contain your affiliate link, so that you got paid a referral bonus every time someone clicked it or used it to buy a vacation or flight. The advertisement does not have to get intrusive and certainly not maddening.
What if you had a hundred ebooks out there at $5-10 each and a couple of novels or books of short stories with adverts in them? That could be an income or a retirement pot or simply a bonus to what you usually earn.
And what if you wanted to get it begun quickly? You could outsource the writing of the ebook, yet buy the rights to it so that you could put out it under your own name.
If you choose to go down this path, ask the author to also compose a press release of 200-300 words and a sales letter-cum-summary of the book in 500 words to help you sell and promote the publication.
You could compose these things yourself, but there is a huge difference between professional sales copy and what most individuals turn out and it makes all the difference to sales figures.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a range of topics, but is now concerned with handheld book readers. If you want to know more, please go to our web site at Kindle vs Book