So Many People Online Say It. So Can You Become A Millionaire Selling Ebooks?

To become a millionaire selling ebooks needs one big factor:

It is extremely difficult. But not impossible.

This post isn't what this website is all about, it is not a "get rich quick" thing. So we need to talk about what is already online and try to make sense of it all.

The 3 following examples have been online and therefore the facts tend to waiver:

1. The Four Hour Work Week
2. Online Marketer: $1.43 million sold of product in 12 hours
3. Amanda Hocking/ John Locke: Multiple $1.95 kindle ebooks being sold leading to millionaire status

Lets take each point and figure out their facts.

Example 1. The Four Hour Work Week

The 4HWW (four hour work week by Tim Ferris) is actually a really good read and I have bought a copy and I am thankful that I did.

Wha?

As a resource and a nudge in the “right direction” it does it well. It saves you hunting online and it gives you a good oversight to what you can do if you know where to go online.

The book gives examples of different “normal” folks who have removed themselves from the rat race and still work, but they work intelligently and within their own hours.

The issue?

I am unsure of what Tim actually did and those sources…

You see there are many instances within the book which actually state that infoproducts are the way to go for a carefree life- one where profitability is maximized.

However this is not where Tim made his money. He made it from selling a health related product to the tune of $80k/month…which is a really nice income.

It is a thought for another time, but about that 4hww ebook idea?

Selling ebooks as an income generator is the main key to the 4HWW. The 4hww is a great success as we have found but that is not because it tells you how to accomplish what Tim actually did. So when you find out that someone made a cool $10 million/ year writing ebooks (The Truth About Abs) you want to know how they did it. Here is a few quotes from Tim from his site:

“First off, writing books is a terrible revenue model for authors.”

“For established and successful authors, like Seth Godin or Jim Collins, self-publishing in print or digital is a supremely viable option”

” I know one man who nets between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 per year with a single e-book and affiliate cross-selling to his customer lists. I’m not kidding. The downside is that you need to be a world-class marketer and understand affiliate and CPA Advertising better than anyone else in your niche (since there is little barrier to entry, and therefore plenty of competition). Prepare to be an uber-competent CEO or fail if you choose this option.”

Kinda harder than it looks.

Also I know that most of the money from the abs ebook sales came from one person who sold a huge amount of product through CPA- who was also the authors friend.

Now it sounds like I am really giving the 4hww a really hard time. I believe it gets people talking, it gets people wanting more- which can be good or bad, but one persons success can not be then generalised over a huge ebook field and imply that ebooks are the way to go especially if your money wasn’t made initially with an infoproduct.

Sure Seth Godin makes money from the books that he releases and he makes good money from it…but that is not his cause, which is to gain a tribe, promote his speaking and other side projects which are vastly more profitable.

Example 2. Online Marketer: Become A Millionaire Selling Ebooks

Ages ago an online marketer nearly broke the Internet chat rooms by selling tons of product in about 12 hours. His total dollar amount was $1.43million. So naturally most marketers at the time did exactly the same thing. Did it work?

Some did, and many others did not. This was down to a multiple amount of factors:

• a super...super...and I really mean it, super targeted audience that has been growing and growing. They bought similar smaller dollar products in the past and they were also thinned out (none responsive email addresses were deleted)
• his audience was large
• he had access to other large audiences who were also super targeted
• he was well know and trusted
• he actually started to prepare his audience (and contacted other friends) many months in advance of this "sale day". It was like a movie release. You promote way before your product comes out
• The product was at a decently high price.

So is it possible? yes. Do you need to work at it before hand? Yes.

Example 3. John Locke and Amanda Hocking

Now the information for John Locke comes from here: http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2012/08/27/john-locke-paid-people-to-buy-his-books-last-laughs-laugh-best/

John Locke, within a space of 1 year made over a million selling 99c Kindle ebooks and was the first to become a millionaire selling ebooks. His story was a huge success and was writen about by everyone. His success also garnered journalists who started to look into just "how" he become a millionaire selling ebooks.

Well, he didnt actually break the rules (then) he seemed to bend them very strongly :)

He paid for reviews which kicked in Amazons Search results which boosted his books higher. It is also assumed that he also bought his own books which again boosted his rankings. Amazon changed it search results to compensate for this but sales increased.

However there seems to be something that seems left out.

His books were sold eventually to people- not bots. People actually liked them and bought more to the series.

• It also helped that his books were 99c. not that big a risk.
• Non-fiction and short- quickly read, move onto the next
• They were OK written- not totally outstanding, but they didnt have to be

Amanda Hocking started doing the same model (99c not bending the rules) and sold 1.5 million books raking in $2 million. She also believed that small, quickly read, good and cheap books were the idea.

When you have George RR Martin making tons of cash from his books is that they:

• are not cheap or are they poor quality
• he took an astonishing long time creating them
• they are all linked
• groups have formed promoting the lore which in turn creates more demand for books and more lore
• they have much in common with Lord of the Rings so people are used to the content and background
• dragons, magic, kings/ queens were all combined adding more "audience"

The Formula To Become A Millionaire Selling Ebooks?

As you probably know there isn't one...exactly. What you can do is make the planets and stars align to help you on your way. Based upon the above successes you have to figure out the following:

• Are you going to sell ebooks really cheap and then sell lots of them? It can be used for kinda of any niche you want. Works well for fiction books but can work well if you are stating one topic out of a series of non-fiction related topics. Each book is internally linked to one another. This also promotes Amazons "customers also bought" section.
• Are you going to sell few but at a higher mark up cost? Just one book won't do it but you can make a healthy amount of income from one book that is a very useful guide. This is the thought of why a website and not just a book with the same amount of information?
• Are you going to build an audience first (easier) or are you going to promote you ebook once published (harder)?
• Is the content required and sought after or are you just copying? Game Of Thrones isnt the first book to be about dragons etc but it is the first book to have a twist of the tale, be good and causes you to invest time. Only if someone has invested time do they follow with the next book. If the first book is bad and makes no sense then the second book won't get much traction. Novels and large books are notoriously hard to sell because of this predicament that is why, initially, smaller books are more helpful to sell. Build your characters and audience and then make the books bigger
• Do you have access to people who are not your competition but also have a large amount of followers?  Regardless of what you think of her work, Stephenie Meyer's has achieved awesome success. But initially she created fan fiction and built her audience that way. George RR Martin got his TV break in 1984- way before Game Of Thrones came on TV.
• How are you going to tell people about your book? Most writers write about how they wrote a book and promote to that audience. I don't care and I have never bought a book from them. The audience is not super targeted. Apart from known authors, most are thrown away quick reads so you don't make a large amount of cash on just one. You need many to make up for the $0.99-2.99 price. One off massive books are Ok if you have the audience that wants it. Also with fiction you need to promote it through a blog/ website to discuss the book/ history of the characters/ plot meanings/ pictures/ maps etc. Not doing that? Why not? Go above and beyond. If you really like it, really get into it. Check out Pottermore (now Wizardingworld) for a good idea about this and the thousands of websites that are dedicated to Harry Potter lore- multiple years after the first book was published.

Quick Math With 2 Common Platforms

I'm not going to be deep here and review all the platforms, that will be another time. What I will suggest is to take 2 and then compare. Then see how you can become a millionaire selling ebooks ;)

Lets go with the usual:

1. Amazon
2. Clickbank

Both are very fine places to sell your ebook through, but there are some hickups which most websites won't tell you about (at the time of writing and for independent authors):

1. Amazon

According to the above screen grab, if you sell at 99c then you get 35% royalty- which is 35cents per book sold.

If you sell at 70% commission- you get the 70%, then you can only sell your book between $2.99 and $9.99. So you get $6.77 for each $9.99 book sold.

If you want to sell your book higher- past $9.99, say the usual $47 price then you have to go through the 35% commission route. Here's 35% of the best prices:

• 12.95: 35% = $4.53
• 19.95: 35% = $6.98
• 27: 35% = $9.45
• 47: 35% = $16.45

So at higher prices the better commission. However, Amazon also have a reduction in price if those books go over 11MB- a delivery charge of $1/ MB over. So 12MB take off $1 per those 35% prices (so 4.53 becomes 3.53)

Thats a lot of books to be sold at such a small royalty ($0.35). Even if you increase the price the royalty is still low- especially for a book which you spent some time producing. It is weird to see that you would get similar royalties for a $19.95 book sold at 35% compared to a $9.99 at 70% royalty. However Amazon does take away the hassle of delivery, hosting, your own front page, ebook conversion and payment, so that is what you are "buying".

2. Clickbank.

Clickbank might be the saviour. They get you to host (your first product can be hosted through them) and they take a percentage- 7.5% and $1 off each transaction.

This looks better. A $19.99 product now gives you: $17.49 Yay!

However.

There's quite a few hoops to jump through if you don't allow then to host your product:

• You have to host a landing page,
• thank you page (if not using Clickbank as the host), 
• be responsible for customer service
• make your ebook visible to various different devices (does it show well on an iPad compared to a computer?)

So in a way that $17.49 needs to cover hosting and webname/ domain costs. Then you have marketing. If you want other people to promote your product you have to think of giving them something for it.

A percentage of your total. This is what Clickbank is known for, having people who are used to selling products.

Now we can only go upto 75% commission but that seems to be the most used. So now, on top of your awesome $17.49 we need to drop that down to cover our sales force:

So removing Clickbank fees and your generous 75% to sellers, you get $4.38 per sale.

In this instance you can't sell on Clickbank for 99c, the minimum is $3. But that gets wiped out with fees etc. The best bet is to go higher in price.

The Best Way To Become A Millionaire Selling Ebooks

To use the cheap ebook option as a product lead and try your best to either:

• make that audience buy more of the cheaper products but you just have to produce tons of them in a short space of time to be any good. With the junk that is already online (because 99c books were regarded as the best way to make money) your quality threshold will have to increase to counter peoples perception that low price = poor quality
• allow a cheap or free product to lead into a higher priced product. The amount of advertisement that you will have to do for the second book is reduced and the quality of the buyers is increased. This can be repeated multiple times. You can have multiple higher priced products. Or multiple lower priced products to filter more people into the high priced product.

Check out more ebook selling ideas here. For ideas and info for selling eproducts, check out the blog.

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